DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
A couple of weeks ago, the Smithsonian screened Peter Lorre’s English language debut in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. This week, the Goethe Institut goes back a few years to the film that catapulted Lorre to international stardom, Fritz Lang’s unforgettable chiller, M. Lorre plays a serial killer (and, by allusion, molester) of children in Berlin whose crimes spark a manhunt so fierce that it becomes difficult for honest thieves to do a day’s work. The Berlin police force’s take on the “all hands” police crackdown D.C. residents have become familiar with doesn’t turn up the criminal it’s meant to roust, but does manage to reduce crime in all other sectors. As a result, Berlin’s pickpockets and petty thieves band together, using the city’s beggars as a communications conduit, to catch the murderer and get the cops back off the streets.
M was Lang’s first sound film after having already established himself as one of the best European directors of the silent era. But unlike many silent directors who had trouble transitioning to sound, Lang’s first feature with a soundtrack is arguably the finest film he ever made. Lang doesn’t allow the cumbersome added equipment slow him down, making some of his most visually dazzling work yet. More than that, though, M is not just a silent film that happens to have audible dialog, as many early talkies were. Lang’s use of sound is essential to the work, particularly in the use of the theme whistled by the killer. Rather than treating sound as a hassle and a fad, Lang easily incorporated it into his already deep bag of tricks, and combined with Lorre’s unsettling presence, made a thriller that loses none of it’s eerie impact even having been made so long ago.
View the trailer.
Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the Goethe Institut. $6 ($4 for members).
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Japanese director Shūsuke Kaneko moved away from monster movies with his 2006 two part series Death Note, which was based on a popular Japanese manga comic. The series trades in the huge, visible horror of Kaneko’s entries into the Godzilla/Gamera canon for a much more subtle psychological tension. The story focuses on a young man named Light, who has found a notebook (the “Death Note”) that can be used as an instrument of murder: write down a name, picture that person’s face, and they will die. Light determines he will use the book to rid the world of evil, though the police view him as a vigilante and a murderer. In this second installment, a police officer called “L” is trying to determine if Light is the killer, even as a second killer is taking credit for a new rash of murders. The Death Note series was hugely popular at the Japanese box office, and was followed by an animated TV series, as well as another, more tangentially related sequel, directed by Ring director Hideo Nakata.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. at the Japan Information & Culture Center, Embassy of Japan. Free.
