A selective and subjective guide to the most interesting films playing within easy Metro access during the coming week.

—

Quvenzhané Wallis (Jess Pinkham/Fox Searchlight)

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Six year old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, who was five when she won the audition for this role) runs with sparklers to celebrate the Fourth. It’s a typically American scene in a distinctly American town. Beasts of the Southern Wild works within archetypal American tropes—the river journey, the rebel—but makes of them a kind of American magical realism. The film is set off the Louisiana coast in a fictional and impoverished land called The Bathtub, and when a great storm overwhelms the land, Hushpuppy’s imagination gets her through the national crisis—as well as a personal one. Critics have been eating this up since Sundance, and while I liked the movie, in the end it feels like a movie that has to remind you to like it, with music there to tell you to feel triumph even though the acting and photography are strong enough to convey that on its own. Still, this is a remarkable first feature from director Benh Zeitlin, and the praise for young Wallis is well-earned. She’s not just a cute empowered little girl, but an actress who conveys both self-reliance and child-like imagination.

View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row

—

Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat in The 39 Steps

The 39 Steps

A man is wanted for a murder he didn’t commit. It’s one of the basic stories of crime fiction and of the work of Alfred Hitchcock. This 1935 film, based on a novel by John Buchan, is one of the first masterpieces by the master of the macabre, and later inspired a hit Broadway adaptation. Dashing Canadian Richard Hannady (Robert Donat) attends a London Music Hall performance by Mr. Memory when shots are fired. Part of the AFI’s Spy CInema series, which features a slew of Hitchcock favorites. Tonight you can catch one more screening of Hitchcock’s mid-career treatment of the innocent fugitive, North By Northwest, proof that you can fill a movie with ideas — about identity, sexuality and America—and still make a crowd-pleasing entertainment. This weekend the AFI showcases Hitchcock in their 70mm Spectacular with showing of the 1996 restoration print of Vertigo. For a recent B-movie riff on one of North by Northwest’s most famous set pieces, see the SyFy channel’s original movie Bigfoot, a regular smorgasbord of American icons like the titular beast, Mount Rushmore, and television legends Danny Bonaduce and Barry Williams.

The 39 Steps screens Friday, July 6 through Thursday, July 12 at the AFI Silver.

—

Anu Yada

Walk with Me

Part of the Picture House series at the International Arts & Artists’ Hillyer Art Space, this homegrown documentary “follows three women from three generations who use the power of theatre to grapple with social issues in Washington, D.C.” Learn about the activist work of the late DC theater-artist Rebecca Rice, dance-theater artist Lisa Biggs, and South Asian actor-educator Anu Yada. Director Ellie Walton made the 2008 documentary Chocolate City, and co-directed with former Living Stage Theater Company director Tanisha Christie. The directors will be at the Hillyer to answer questions after the screening.

View the trailer.
Wednesday July 11 at 7:30 pm at the International Arts and Artists’ Hillyer Art Space, 9 Hillyer Court NW. $10 suggested donation

—

Rembrant’s “J’accuse” (Content Media Group)

Greenaway on Painting

In the 1980s Peter Greenaway was one of the more reliable art-house directors, but after peaking with The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, his painterly projects have become increasingly self-indulgent — ask anyone who tried to sit through his 2003 appearance at the Hirshhorn with two episodes of the unfinished Tulse Luper Suitcases. Greenaway has since declared that the future of cinema lies in moving away from the script to concentrate on the image, and his most high-profile work of late was an art installation at the Park Avenue Armory. A new film about 16th century Dutch painter Hendrik Goltzius is due this year, and the National Gallery prepares you for it with Nightwatching, Greenaway’s “biographical fiction” of Rembrant van Rijn, as well as the documentary Rembrant’s “J’Accuse”.

View trailers for Rembrandt’s “J’Accuse” and Nightwatching.
Rembrandt’s “J’Accuse” screens Saturday, July 7 at 4:00. Nightwatching screens Sunday, July 8 at 4:30. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.

—

Frankenstein’s Daughter

Lab assistant Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy) needs a brain for his boss’s experiment, but when you discover that Frank is short for Frankenstein (the title may be a clue!) and Oliver is the infamous doctor’s grandson, it stands to reason that the boss’s niece (Sandra Knight) will become a monster the likes of which Los Angeles has never seen before. Frank isn’t the only son of a celebrity on hand. The movie also stars Harold Lloyd, Jr., who died in 1965 at the young age of 40 from a massive stroke, having outlived his father by just a few months.

View the trailer.
Monday. July 9 at 8:00 at McFadden’s. Free, suggested donation $5.

—

Also opening this week, Michelle WIlliams and Seth Rogen in the hipster melodrama Take This Waltz, and Whores’ Glory, a survey of the world’s most notorious red-light districts. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.