DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
What it is: The next round of six different retrospective series at the AFI, all starting this week.
Why you want to see it: It’s another diverse array of series from the AFI, with a little something for everyone. Here’s the rundown:
>>Royal Wedding Celebration: It might be a stretch to call this one a “series,” as it’s really just a pair of movies that AFI has thrown together to run for the week leading up to the big Will & Kate nuptials. One is, appropriately, 1951’s Royal Wedding, a musical with Fred Astaire and Jane Powell playing a sibling dance duo in London at the time of the wedding of now-Queen Elizabeth to Prince Philip. The other is 2009’s Young Victoria, about the marriage of Victoria to Prince Albert in the mid-19th century.
>>AFI Life Achievement Award Retrospective: Morgan Freeman: Every year, the AFI gives an award for lifetime achievement in film, and this year’s recipient is Morgan Freeman. The retrospective honoring that win covers seven of Freeman’s best known films, starting this weekend with his Oscar-nominated turn in Driving Miss Daisy.
>>The Films of Todd Haynes: This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of director Todd Haynes debut feature, the 1991 indie Poison, which was hailed as a landmark of the early ’90s New Queer Cinema (and created a culture war firestorm when conservatives found out that the subversive and sexual film was funded in part with an NEA grant). With that milestone in mind, and Haynes turning in a strong effort in his engrossing mini-series adaptation of Mildred Pierce for HBO earlier this month, it seems a fine time to look back over his career. Haynes has only directed five features over the course of 20 years, but given his unusual position as a director who dips his toe in the mainstream even as he engages in constant formal experimentation, finding backers daring enough to fund his visions can’t ever be easy. The AFI is screening all five of those films in chronological order over the course of the next month: Poison, Safe (The Village Voice‘s choice for best film of the ’90s), Velvet Goldmine (Citizen Kane brilliantly recast as glam-rock homage), Far From Heaven (Haynes’ beautiful and incisive take on Sirkian melodrama), and I’m Not There (a wildly successful experiment in surreally subverting the staid world of the rock biopic by making a film about Bob Dylan without the character of Bob Dylan, only representations of the characters he created for himself).
>>Alfred Hitchcock Retrospective, Part II: The theater’s first installment of Hitchcock’s work concentrated on his early British career. For Part 2, they’ve followed the director to Hollywood for the period from 1940 through the mid-50s. The biggest, most recognizable films of his career were yet to come, but these are the films that he built his American reputation on, from the sumptuous literary adaptation of Rebecca, to his own take on the American film noir of the period in Shadow of a Doubt and Saboteur, and the inventive Rope, a murder mystery filmed with the illusion of taking place in a single, continuous shot. There are 19 films in all for this section of the AFI’s ongoing retrospective.
>>A Season of Rohmer: This series of films from the French master of understated, elegant personal dramas technically already got underway at the National Gallery; now the AFI joins that museum with their portion of the co-presentation, which will screen 10 of Rohmer’s features, as well as a pair of early shorts, from now until the end of June.
>>Poetry of the Past: The Visionary Films of František Vlácil: And finally, this series highlights the work of a director who isn’t well known in the U.S., but who was one of the key figures in kickstarting the Czech New Wave in the 60s. The offerings here are the most obscure of any of these series, as only two of these titles are even available to American audiences for home viewing, making this a rare opportunity to see the celebrated, but often forgotten work of this director.
All these series begin this weekend, and run for as little as a week to as long as the end of June. Check the AFI’s website for specific details.
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Bruce Springsteen – The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Down
What it is: The title pretty much says it all: it’s a documentary showing the making of The Boss’ classic fourth album.
Why you want to see it: Director Thom Zimny goes with the usual formula for these sorts of affairs, combining archival footage of Bruce and the band as they wrote and recorded the record, juxtaposing that with modern-day interviews looking back at the impact of the record. But Zimny apparently had access to mountains of footage from those days, giving him plenty to choose from as he shows the creative process that led Springsteen — after the three years of ugly music business-related turmoil that followed the release of Born to Run — to this record.
View the trailer.
Each of the next two Sundays at 5:30 p.m. at West End Cinema.
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What it is: A classic Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant/Jimmy Stewart comedy about a taboid reporter (Stewart) desperate to cover the wedding of a high-profile socialite (Hepburn), calling in a favor from her ex-husband (Grant) to get his foot in the door.
Why you want to see it: This one has stood the test of time for a reason; the screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, based on a Philip Barry play, is whipsmart and rapid-fire with the hilarious dialogue. While it has the general pace and feel of a classic screwball comedy, it never pushes into the sometimes outlandish territory typical of those films, and relies on uncommon chemistry in the interrelationships of all the leads, including the sometimes overlooked turn by Ruth Hussey as the photographer who accompanies Stewart to get the story. Next week’s screening at the Newseum is part of their “Reel Journalism” series, devoted to films about journalism. Journalist Nick Clooney (that’s George’s dad) hosts, and invites guests, usually high-profile journalists, to discuss the film. For this title, he’s enlisted MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell, along with her husband Alan Greenspan, who we suspect will have to tear himself away from round-the-clock screenings of his old pal Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged at E Street to make the event.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Newseum. $15.
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The Black Maria: Selections from the Festival
What it is: A selection of films from a New Jersey-based festival of experimental film and video, celebrating it’s 30th year devoted to it’s mission: to “advocate, exhibit, and reward cutting edge works from independent film and videomakers.”
Why you want to see it: Named for the New Jersey building that Thomas Edison essentially created as the world’s first movie studio, Black Maria provides a unique opportunity to see films that honor the spirit of innovation within the medium that drove Edison. Following the festival’s award ceremony every year, the festival takes the award-winning films on the road, and this weekend D.C. gets its turn to see a few dozen of these innovative documentary and experimental shorts.
Saturday at 3 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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What it is: The animated story of a man and the German Shepherd that he rescues, based on J.R. Ackerly’s 1956 memoir.
Why you want to see it: Don’t let the animation animal friendship fool you: this is no kid’s movie. The story that unfolds here is that of a lonely man who spends his middle age, after years of trying unsuccessfully to find love. (Ackerly was openly gay, but in the early-to-mid 20th century that probably didn’t make things significantly easier, with so many others closeted.) In Tulip, he found the devotion he’d never come across in other people, and in turn devoted himself to her as completely as a parent or a spouse. Directors Paul and Sandra Fierlinger hand-drew the animation (though on a computer rather than paper or cels), with Sandra’s watercolors serving as the backgrounds to the scenes. Christopher Plummer voices Ackerly, and Lynn Redgrave appears in her final role as the voice of the grocer’s wife.
View the trailer.
Next Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Hirshhorn. Free.
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Also opening tomorrow: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Super-Size Me director Morgan Spurlock’s examination of the role of product placement in media today, told via his attempt to fund his entire movie on, well, money from product placements. And Potiche, a new comedy from French director François Ozon, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu. We’ll have full-length reviews of both tomorrow.
