DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most finger lickin’ movies coming to town in the coming week.

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Juno Temple and Matthew McConaughey (LD Entertainment)

Killer Joe

A young trailer park resident (Emile Hirsch) is five large in debt to a violent drug lord. In desperation, he plots to kill his mother, whom he believes has a life insurance policy of $50,000 payable to his sister, virgin nymphet Dottie (Juno Temple). Enter the titular lawman-cum-assassin (Matthew McConaughey) and a six-pack of whoop-ass. Based on the play by Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning author Tracy Letts, Killer Joe depicts life in trailer park Texas as stormy, brutal, and short, and if Letts finds an ounce of respect for his clumsily plotting characters, director William Friedkin loses it. Friedkin directed iconic 70s pictures like The Exorcist and The French Connection, and more recently directed Michael Shannon in the film of Letts’ play Bug. But Killer Joe drips with contempt for its morally and monetarily impoverished souls, treating them for the most part like a bunch of dumb hicks. Letts’ writing brings it back in the final act with tense scenes where his sadistic lawman parses language with a dry, acidic black humor, but unfortunately this is also where things get sick. Scheming trailer wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) gets punched in the face in a scene that draws laughter, and it gets worse when she is subjected to a degradation that KFC is probably wishing they never allowed. I’m no prude when it comes to violence in movies, and I can’t wait for Django Unchained to unleash its bloody fury upon the holiday season, but this seems like another bad example of the brutal-cool school that Tarantino has wrought. Sorry kids, I don’t think violence against women is funny, and I long for old-fashioned movies that show more respect for humanity, like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.

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Sophie Quinton (Jean-Claude Lother/First Run Features)

Nobody Else But You

The French title of this quirky thriller is Poupoupidou, which is more intriguing and descriptive of the movie’s tone, but it’s also a better indication of how forced that tone is. Prolific crime writer David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) is suffering from writer’s block, and is driving through France’s Little Siberia when he passes by a snowy crime scene. The comely corpse belongs to Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton), a local woman who’s brief candle took her from calendar model to weather girl before her body was found. This cross between the classic film noir Laura and the neo-noir Fargo drops references to Wong Kar-Wai, Bunuel and Hitchcock, but the overwhelming presence if that of the woman whom Lecoeur believes she was reincarnated from: Marilyn Monroe. There are great themes here: local celebrity, the vagaries of fame, and the male gaze, but it never digs any deeper that that pretty surface. Its leads look the part but are stuck with a script that is too self-conscious and clever. Nobody Else but You is a lovely film to look at, but it’s too busy being somebody else to ever find it’s own voice.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.

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Some Like it Hot

Moviegoers jonesing for the real Marilyn need go no further than Silver Spring. This weekend the AFI begins its homage to the iconic sex symbol on the fiftieth anniversary of her death. Billy Wilder’s classic comedy is one of the highlights of a tradition of cross-dressing comedy that runs from Shakespeare to Jack and Jill. A pair of musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) witness a mob hit and are forced to go into hiding — in drag. And of course they fall for Sugar Kane (Monroe). Some Like it Hot lost ground Sight and Sound‘s critics poll of the top 50 greatest films of all time, but still ranks a six-way tie at number 42.

View the trailer.
Friday, August 3 at 7 p.m.; Saturday, August 4 at 1 p.m.; Sunday, August 5 at 4 p.m. At the AFI Silver Theatre.

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(David Cox/Seventh Art)

Portrait of Wally

Subtitled, “The face that launched a thousand lawsuits,” this documentary looks at the complicated history of painter Egon Schiele’s 1912 portrait of his mistress and one of his favorite models. Schiele’s nudes were vivid and explicit to the point that contemporaries dismissed them as pornography. Wally’s striking baby blues are at the center of a work that is striking but doesn’t have the aesthetic frisson of those daring nudes. Director Andrew Shea surrounds Wally with a conventional legal thriller based on questionable provenance, it’s players the dons and doyennes of the art world. For all its intrigue, Portrait of Wally doesn’t tell its story in a way that would reach a wider audience, but fans of Schiele and those interested in legal machinations, in or outside the art world, will eat it up.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.

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Pola Negri in The Spanish Dancer (Herbert Brenon, 1923, 35 mm, 56 minutes). Image courtesy of Photofest

Ciné-Concert: The Spanish Dancer

The National Gallery of Art’s series From Vault to Screen showcases recent film preservation efforts from the world’s great archives. This week’s program comes from Amsterdam’s EYE Film Institute. Costume melodrama The Spanish Dancer (1923) stars silent vixen Pola Negri as a Spanish gypsy with a colorful love life, in a role originally meant for Rudolph Valentino. Shown with actress/director Lois Weber’s 1916 silent Shoes, a socially conscious weeper about a shopgirl who wears out her only pair. With live musical accompaniment by Andrew Simpson.

Sunday, August 5 at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.

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Also opening this week, Searching for Sugar Man, a documentary about the quest for a folk singer who made two albums in the early 70s before disappearing into obscurity; and Colin Farrell takes the Governator’s place in a remake of Total Recall. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.