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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Peter Lorre and Joan Lorring in THREE STRANGERS.The AFI Silver Theatre’s annual festival dedicated to hardboiled cinema wraps up this week with two Rita Hayworth classics: Gilda (October 28 and 30) and The Lady from Shanghai (October 27 and November 1), which has the added detriment—or bonus, perhaps—of director Orson Welles’s bad Irish brogue. Also on hand are a pair from director Jules Dassin, perennial favorite Naked City (October 27 and November 1) and the Burt Lancaster-helmed prison drama Brute Force (October 27 and 29). But the dark series shines brightest in the lesser known titles it brings to the Silver’s big screen. Naked Alibi (October 27 and 30) finds Gene Barry is no match for Gloria Grahame. Three Strangers (October 28 and 29) has a rich pedigree: written by John Huston and starring noir icons Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. This atmospheric movie about a mysterious lottery ticket and a Chinese idol has never been on DVD.
View the trailer for Three Strangers.
Through November 1 at the AFI Silver Theatre. See the festival guide for a complete schedule.
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Zlatko Buric and Richard Coyle (Radius Pictures)Frank (Richard Coyle) is a small-time drug dealer who lives the thug life in London, trading coke for favors (sexual and other) in a world of strip clubs and techno clubs. But after a bad drug deal, he finds himself in the pusherman equivalent of a shame spiral. Director Luis Prieto’s English-language remake of Nicholas Winding Refn’s Danish Pusher trilogy has Refn on hand as executive producer, but anybody expecting the stylish revelation of Drive may be disappointed by what is basically a watchable tv-movie. Still, Pusher is worth watching, if only for a holdover from Refn’s original series: Zlatko Burić, reprising his role as sleazy drug kingpin Milo. Sydney Greenstreet lives in spirit in the body of this Croat-Danish actor.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
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The National Gallery of Art presents a ciné-concert of this film directed by King Vidor. Vidor’s long career spanned seven decades from the silent era to a 1980 documentary short about painter Andrew Wyeth, with uncredited stops at little movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind along the way. This silent melodrama stars Marion Davies, whose film career is less remembered than her association with media mogul William Randolph Hearst. It was long assumed that Orson Welles based the character of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane on Davies, though Welles would come to defend her rosy talents. Ben Model will provide live piano accompaniment.
View a clip from The Patsy.
Saturday, October 27 at 2 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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In this class-conscious historical drama, a gentle commoner is called upon to impersonate a cruel king. It’s a tale as old as The Prince and the Pauper and as familiar as Dave, but this iteration takes place in seventeenth century Korea. Lee Byung-Hun (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) takes on the dual lead role.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Angelika Film Center Mosaic (8200 Strawberry Lane, Fairfax).
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The horror of time, commercial video and poor resolution. In Kentucky.What kind of man wears a Survivor t-shirt? The kind of West Kentucky University student that worked on this homegrown video project in the early 1990s. The awkward title and anemic production values are just a few of the reasons this movie is little-known, but I have to respect the curators of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society for scraping the coffers of horror cinema history for a movie that nobody else would think to program.
View a clip of a doomed Kentucky Survivor fan.
Monday, October 29 at 8:00 pm at McFadden’s. Free, suggested donation $5.
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Also opening this week, Andy and Lana Wachowski enlist the help of Tom Tywker to adapt David Mitchell’s “unfilmable” novel Cloud Atlas; and John Hakwes stars as a polio sufferer trying to lose his virginity in The Sessions. We’ll have full reviews of both tomorrow.
