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DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Reel Affirmations Film Festival
Reel Affirmations has become one of the area's biggest and highest profile film festivals, bringing the best of LGBT cinema to D.C. every year for nearly two decades. For this year's 19th iteration, the festival is using the Shakespeare Theatre's Harman Center for the Arts as the main base of operations, with other screenings at the usual venues of the AFI, the Goethe Institut, and the DCJCC, as well as a few other scattered venues around town.
Tonight's opening night film is An Englishman in New York, in which John Hurt (pictured) plays the English writer and gay icon Quentin Crisp.
View the festival trailer.
Opens tonight at The Shakespeare Theatre's Harman Center for the Arts, and continues through October 24 at a number of venues in town. See the schedule for details and for instructions on how to purchase tickets.
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Twenty-seven European embassies and a dozen other local cultural institutions have collaborated to bring the city the Kids Euro Festival, which features over a hundred kids' events, including reading workshops, puppet shows, storytelling, and other performances. There are also eight film programs scheduled over the course of the festival, with children's movies from Austria, Finland, Denmark and others.
The festival as a whole starts today and runs through the 24th, with the first film programs starting on Sunday. See the schedule for details. All events are free.
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You just can't have Halloween without some scary movies, and as they do every year, the AFI provides the area's best compilation of cinematic frights, including their annual screening of Murnau's Nosferatu with live accompaniment from Carlos Garza's Silent Orchestra. Other highlights include schlock-master Herschell Gordon Lewis' drive-in classic Two Thousand Maniacs, two screenings of zom-rom-com fave Shaun of the Dead (this weekend coinciding with the Silver Spring zombie walk), a repeat screening of Every Other Day is Halloween, about local TV personality Dick Dysel (aka Captain 20/Count Gore De Vol), who will be in attendance. Most of the rest of the movies are concentrated on this year's werewolf theme, including the opening night screening of John Landis' great horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London.
View the trailer for the festival's first movie, An American Werewolf in London.
Opens on Wednesday, and runs through November 4 at the AFI.
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Pork Chop Day
Sunday kicks off the YWCA of the National Capital Area's "Week Without Violence," a string of programs that lasts all through next week with events designed to empower women against domestic violence. One of those programs is a film screening, of Pork Chop Day, a documentary about domestic abuse survivor Debbie Knapp, who was imprisoned for killing her abusive husband. The documentary follows her release from prison after over 21 years, making her the first female inmate in Tennessee ever to be paroled from a life sentence. Knapp will be in attendance to talk after the screening.
Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Gallery Place. Free.
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Spike Jonze's long awaited adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book seems less designed for children as it is for people of Jonze's generation with fond and nostalgic memories of the book from their own childhoods. Sendak's picture book is tremendously brief, storywise, which gives Jonze and his co-writer, novelist Dave Eggers, a largely blank slate to work with in constructing a feature film. The movie may come as a disappointment to parents looking for an experience that approximates the book for their children, but as a work of gorgeous and sentimental fantasy about familial bonds and the imaginative flights of fancy of childhood, it's wildly successful.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at theatres all across the area.
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