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

AFI European Film Showcase

The AFI's annual showcase of European film is consistently the best sampler of concentrated cinematic goodness that D.C. sees all year. Not a festival in the traditional sense, the showcase cherry-picks the best and most celebrated films from other festivals world wide and foreign box-office hits, resulting in a sort of best of collection of films from the continent. This year's program is no exception. The showcase opens tonight with the acclaimed French hit I've Loved You So Long, by Philippe Claudel and starring Kristen Scott Thomas. This weekend's showcase feature, A Christmas Tale (pictured at right) is a dysfunctional holiday tale starring Catherine Deneuve and upcoming Bond bad guy Mathieu Almaric. Other features include Closing Night film Eldorado, Belgium's Academy Award submission about a road trip undertaken by a vintage car dealer and a young junkie thief in a '79 Cadillac, the latest film by Polish Legend Andrzej Wajda (Katyn), and acclaimed Swedish horror flick Let the Right One In, which is primed for an upcoming theatrical run in U.S. indie/art house theaters. In all, the showcase has 35 films from 25 countries.

View the trailer for I've Loved You So Long, tonight's opening film, or the trailer for A Christmas Tale, Saturday's centerpiece screening.
Opens tonight at the AFI and runs through November 25.

---

Synecdoche, New York

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Hollywood's King of Quirk and Prince of Precious, takes his first turn behind the camera to film what is perhaps his most ambitious and thoroughly thought-out script. Synecdoche, New York focuses on an awkward and self-defeating regional theater director (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in a masterful turn) who embarks on an outsized biographical stage project following the departure of his wife and daughter and the unlikely awarding of a MacArthur Genius Grant. Hoffman's play, staged in a life-sized New York City built in a giant warehouse in New York City, is in rehearsals and rewrites for decades, as the play becomes a mirror of Hoffman's own life. Eventually there are actors playing actors playing actors playing Hoffman and the "real" people in his life, in ever farther removed models of the city in nested warehouses. It's like a living, breathing, stage-based Russian Matryoshka doll. The intricacies of Kaufman's script are a wonder to behold, even if his nascent directorial skills are not always quite up to the task of bringing it to the screen.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, the AFI, Bethesda Row, Shirlington, and Fairfax's Cinema Arts.

---

The Salvation Hunters and Children of Divorce

Josef von Sternberg, an early Hollywood maverick (the good kind!), and a master of moody visuals and meticulously constructed settings is mostly known via a few landmark films like The Blue Angel and The Scarlet Empress. As a result, much of the programming in the National Gallery's retrospective of the director's early work will come as a refreshing new perspective on the filmmaker. This weekend the museum screens two early silent works, including von Sternberg's very first film, The Salvation Hunters. The film, about a group of down-and-outers living a hardscrabble existence in the California mud flats, was written, directed, and produced by von Sternberg in a rare independent film made at a time when few films were produced outside the studios. It caught the attention of Charlie Chaplin, who helped the director break into studio pictures, though von Sternberg never totally left behind his independent streak. The second feature showing this weekend is another silent, from a few years later, in which the director took over a tragic love story from Paramount starring Gary Cooper and forever It Girl Clara Bow that the studio had deemed unreleasable in its original form. Despite reshooting much of the film, von Sternberg was uncredited in the film's eventual release.

Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. (The Salvation Hunters) and 4 p.m. (Children of Divorce) at the National Gallery of Art's East Building Concourse theater.

---

Roads to the Interior: Another Side of Japanese Cinema

What comes to mind when one thinks of Japanese cinema? Classic samurai films? Bright and fast-paced techno-anime? Eerie ghost stories? Most American imports from Japan tend to focus on a few familiar genres, and the Freer Gallery's "Roads to the Interior" series seeks to show another side to Japanese film. This weekend they screen three films from up-and-coming director Satoshi Miki, who trades in a brand of urbane humor that may make him into a sort of Japanese Woody Allen. His plots fixate similarly on neuroses: a man in need of a psychiatrist to treat a permanent erection (In the Pool), people trapped in such boring suburban lives that they turn to moonlighting in international espionage to deal with the overbearing ennui and loneliness (Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected), or a student who can't quite seem to finish at university, who turns to unusual measures to deal with the crushing debt he's accumulated in eight years of higher education (Adrift in Tokyo), in a film that's as much a love-letter to Tokyo as Allen's Manhattan was to his city.

View the trailers for Adrift in Tokyo and Turtles Swim Faster Than Expected.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. See the museum's film listings for showtimes. Free.

---

Sextette

You know how sometimes you have those dreams where your subconscious assembles a cast of characters into a situation too bizarre to ever take place in real life? Maybe it's you and Barack Obama hanging out at King's Dominion with Charlie Chaplin, your First Grade teacher, and Evel Knievel, all participating in an impromptu hot-dog and cotton candy eating contest? Have I said too much? Sextette is a film sort of like that. Take an aging sex symbol (an 85-year-old Mae West), a future James Bond (Timothy Dalton), add in a former Beatle (Ringo Star), a soon to be deceased member of the Who (Keith Moon), and Dom DeLouise, along with cameos from Alice Cooper, Tony Curtis, George Hamilton, and Regis Philbin (?!?). Add to that repurposed pop and disco tunes sung by the cast, enough cheesy double entendres to match the rest of Mae West's filmography combined, and a script based on a play penned by West as a star vehicle for herself nearly two decades prior, and a Three's Company-worthy plot line that revolves around merciful pre-coital interruptions of West and Dalton's honeymoon night, and you clearly have one of the most deliciously awful and cringe-worthy movie musicals in film history.

View the trailer.
Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. at the Old Arlington Grill, the final WPFS screening in Arlington before their move downtown. $2 donation suggested.