DCist’s highly subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies coming to town in the next week.
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Joel Kinnaman (Frank Ashberg/ The Weinstein Company)The pre-credit sequence of this tense Swedish crime drama efficiently sets up the two fluids that drive its central character: blood and champagne. Pretty boy JW (The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman, who plans to star in a remake of Robocop) parties with his rich friends from business school but returns to his lower-class apartment to check his account balance—a measly 243 Krona. JW has the chance to make millions in a cocaine deal, but has to maneuver the untrustworthy gauntlet of the Albanian cab company he works for and a Serbian mafia assassin who takes a belated shine to fatherhood (and who reminds me of my dentist). Produced by Martin Scorcese, the film has some of the excitement of Mean Streets, but director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House) replaces that movie’s gritty oldies soundtrack with an electro beat that conveys both the excitement of the sweet life and the tension of a drug heist. And are you listening Hollywood? The music never tells you what to feel. Zac Efron has already been tapped for the American re-make, and maybe that will work, but be sure to catch this excellent import first.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema.
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Peter SellersDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick intended to make a serious drama about nuclear war games, and took initial inspiration from Peter George’s novel Red Alert, a straightforward Cold War thriller. Somewhere along the way Kubrick was intrigued by the comic possibilities of Doomsday. Terry Southern’s script makes for a classic black comedy, but the humor doesn’t take away from the nuclear anxiety. With a fantastic ensemble cast including a menacing Sterling Hayden (he would have made a helluva Roger Sterling), the hilarious pratfalls of George C. Scott, cowboy bombardier Slim Pickens and, with his finger on the pulse of certain doom everywhere you look, Peter Sellers, who was originally slated to play the Pickens role, too.
View the trailer.
Friday, August 10—Saturday, August 11 and Wednesday, August 15—Thursday, August 16 at the AFI Silver Theatre.
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Anthony Hopkins (Magnolia Pictures)In the first shot of this tale of interconnection, an aspiring young model takes off her top for the camera. In a movie called 360, can you guess what the last shot will be? Director Fernando Meirelles made a splash with 2002’s City of God, but where that was genuine and real, his 21st century spin on La Ronde is all contrivance and coincidence. Its characters are always on the move, on the bus, in airport terminals, or in luxury cars, and this makes it hard to get to know anybody, much less care about them. Jude Law and Rachel Weisz are the headliners, but their unfaithful melodrama is less interesting than some of the quieter stories, like of Anthony Hopkins, a man whose daughter has gone missing. When the film spends a little more time with people, like Sergei (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), a chauffeur working for a rich bully, you get a taste of a better movie — one that paid more attention to character than to a forced notion of connectivity. Too much of the rest is uninvolving. The experience is a bit like spending a couple of hours people watching at an airport or bus terminal, and inventing stories about them, except with a budget and international cast.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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Evi Maltagliati and Franco Interlenghi in I Vinti. (Photofest)Michelangelo Antonioni Centenary
The National Gallery of Art teams up with the American Film Institute for a late-summer retrospective of the inconsistent but essential master of cinema best known for L’Avventura (Sunday August 26 at the National Gallery of Art) and Blow-Up (coming to the AFI the weekend of September 11). This weekend the Gallery screens three rarely seen early features. In Story of a Love Affair (1950), a suspicious and rich husband hires a detective to find out if his working-class wife (Miss Italy 1947 Lucia Bosè) is seeing an old flame. I Vinti, released in 1952, offers three morality tales of “unnbalanced postwar youth,” and in Lady without Camelias (1953) Bosè returns as a shop girl who becomes a movie star. Shown with the 1949 short Lies of Love, about the stars of “fumetti,” the photographed comic books also known as photonovels.
Story of a Love Affair screens Saturday, August 11 at 2:00 pm. I Vinti screens Saturday, August 11 at 4:30 pm. Lady without Camelias, preceded by Lies of Love, screens Sunday August 12 at 4:30 p.m. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
Residents of a backwoods community are terrorized by a hungry alien in a silver lamé suit , armed with a laser gun and 1980s graphics. A Psychotronic favorite, Baltimore B-movie kingpin Don Dohler updated his debut film Alien Factor with more blood, boobs, and mayhem. Dick Dyszel, Channel 20’s Count Gore DeVol, reprises his role as Mayor Bert Wicker, and will make a special appearance at the screening.
View the trailer.
Monday, August 13 at McFadden’s at 8 pm. Free, suggested donation $5.
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Also opening this week, two movies take wildly different approaches to the way people pretend to be someone they’re not: the fascinating documentary about a 23-yr old Frenchman passing himself off as a 16-yr old Texan, The Imposter; and the timely new Will Ferrell vehicle Campaign. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
