DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Alice Lowe (Ben Wheatley/IFC)Rugged ginger Chris (co-writer Steve Oram) takes his sheltered girlfriend Tina (Alice Lowe) to the rolling British countryside for a vacation. But mundane destinations like the Crich Tramway Museum, the Ribblehead Viaduct, and the Keswick Pencil Museum are soon overshadowed by vulgar fellow tourists, and finally something darker, promised by an ad campaign that boasts, “Death has a ginger beard.” Edgar “Shaun of the Dead” Wright produced this black comedy by director Ben Wheatley (Kill List, the forthcoming A Field in England), who sets his Midlands take on Bonnie and Clyde to an ironic pop soundtrack, natch.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Landmark Cinema.
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Jimmy Jean-Louis as Toussaint LouvertureThis weekend the AFI hosts the 13th annual Caribbean Filmfest, co-presented by Caribbean Association of World Bank and IMF Staff, Caribbean Professional Network, Institute of Caribbean Studies and TransAfrica. The series launches Friday night with Home Again, the story of three very different people returning to Kingston, Jamaica after being deported from their adopted lands. The post-screening reception promises tropical-flavored ice cream, which makes this the tastiest film in town all week. Other festival highlights include the reggae documentary Holding on to Jah (June 1 at 9:30 pm) and the historical epic Toussaint Louverture (June 2 at 5:15 pm).
View the trailers for Home Again and Toussaint Louverture.
Friday, May 31-Sunday, June 2 at the AFI.
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The West End Cinema features new Czech films all month long in the series Czech That Film. Next week’s selection is director Zdeněk Jiráský’s charcter-driven study Flower Buds. The film takes its title from the name of a synchronized gymnastics group. But this is no musical comedy, rather, the dramatic and gradual breakdown of a small-town family, and a cold, bleak antidote to summer blockbuster fatigue. Winner of the 2011 Czech Lion for Best Film.
View the trailer.
Wednesday, June 5 at 7:00 pm at West End Cinema. $11
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Ornella Muti and Jeremy IronsA nobleman (Jeremy Irons) falls in love with a prostitute (Ornella Muti). This melodrama of high society manners is taken from the pages of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. There have been a handful of cinematic adaptations of Proust’s twelve volumes, but none exactly captures the lush, carefully structured prose, much less the scope of the original work. But the late Roger Ebert argued that director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum) made an adaptation that works if you can separate it from the source. The Goethe-Institut will be screening a 35mm print of the film as part of their series Friendship, Freedom, Tolerance: 50 Years French-German Friendship
View the trailer.
Monday, June 3 at 6:30 at the Goethe-Institut. $7
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We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks
Director Alex Gibney has been at the helm of some thirteen documentary features since 2010. You can chalk that up to a hard-working research staff, but whatever passions may be raised by the subject matter (from Ken Kesey to pedophilia scandals to ice hockey), can he really have his artistic heart in so many projects? We Steal Secrets is a reportedly thorough and balanced look at Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, despite the lack of access to the former. But the buzz is that its 130 minutes are dry and curiously not involving, and its view of whistleblowers dangerously biased.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI SIlver
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Also opening this week, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke reprise their roles as Celine and Jesse in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight; and the all-star Scooby-Dooish heist picture Now You See Me. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
