Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
—
Christian Bale (Paramount)Nothing quite says Christmas like subprime mortgages. Writer-director Adam McKay, previously the auteur of the Anchorman movies, takes on the subject of investors deliberately betting against the housing market and revealing cracks in a broken system. Somehow he weaves this dry but crucial subject into a serious satire that’s one of the most unlikely entertainments of the blockbuster season. Sharp writing and editing supports a strong ensemble cast led by Steve Carrell as a math-whiz turned Wall Street hedge-fund manager and Christian Bale as a West Coast money manager and air guitarist who realizes that the housing market is about to collapse. McKay and his cast keep the film breezy and watchable even if you don’t quite understand the financial mechanics at work—and fourth-wall breaking cameos from Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and other personalities try to explain it to you in terms of bubble baths and day-old seafood, respectively.
Watch the trailer.
Opens today at area theaters.
—
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett (The Weinstein Company)In 1950’s Manhattan, a shopgirl (Rooney Mara) falls for a sophisticated older woman (Cate Blanchett). Director Todd Haynes’ lushly photographed period piece (shot on 16mm to give it that gauzy patina of memory) has been hailed as a swooning romance, but it strikes me as more of a psychological drama about a passive young woman swept along by a headstrong elder. Carol is adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, best known for the essential Ripley series and Strangers on a Train. Her books have been adapted into great movies (The American Friend, Strangers) that don’t really capture her deathly dry tone. But although he makes significant changes to his source, Haynes does right by Highsmith’s starkly observational tone. From scene one the film resonates with his early work—it’s impossible to see the dolls that Therese sells without thinking of Superstar, the Karen Carpenter biopic that Haynes made with Barbies. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s the director’s best work since Safe, and a better Douglas Sirk homage than Far from Heaven.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Christmas Day at the Landmark E Street Cinema, Landmark Atlantic Plumbing Cinema, AMC Loews Georgetown, Landmark Bethesda Row, AMC Shirlington, AMC Loews Rio, Angelika Mosaic, Cinema Arts Theatre, and Regal Fairfax Towne Center
—
Tamar Alkan (WJFF)Rami (Gilad Kahana) takes his dog for a walk—and doesn’t return. The Washington Jewish Film Festival calls this 2015 film, “a stark independent thriller from ascendant Israeli auteur Evgeny Ruman (Igor & The Cranes Journey, Lenin in October)” and writes that, “impressively lensed, the narrative boasts economical storytelling and a sparse but powerful style.”
Watch the trailer.
Tuesday, December 29 at 7:30 pm at the DCJCC, 1529 16th Street NW.
—
(Milestone Fims)Septuagenarian actor Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli) has just finished performing in a production of Ionesco when he learns that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law were killed in an accident. This weekend, the National Gallery of Art wraps up its series, Twenty-Five Years of Milestone Film with a 35mm print of director Manoel de Oliveira’s 2001 film. The director was in his 90s when he made the film, and worked almost until the very end. De Oliveira died in April of this year at 106 years old. The late Roger Ebert wrote that “few films seem so wise and knowing about the fact of age and the approach of the end. And at his great age, de Oliveira dispenses with the silliness of plot mechanics and tells his story in a simple, unadorned fashion, as episodes and observations, trusting us to understand.” Co-starring Catherine Deneuve and John Malkovich.
Sunday, December 27 at 4 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
—
Dan HaggertyDan Haggerty is best known as TV’s “Grizzly Adams,” but the actor’s early career was spent typecast as a biker in exploitation movies like Chrome and Hot Leather. By the mid-’70s, he was typecast as a clueless mountain man and reached what was perhaps his professional nadir on an edition of “Battle of the Network Stars” in which he was defeated by a pinball machine. The Washington Psychotronic Film Society have unearthed a 1989 holiday horror movie that shows his career never recovered. As their curators describe it: “A young woman discovers that she is the focus of an evil Nazi experiment involving selective breeding and summoned elves, an attempt to create a race of supermen. She and two of her friends are trapped in a department store with an elf, and only Dan Haggerty (“The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams”), as the renegade loose-cannon Santa Claus, can save them!
Watch the trailer.
Monday, December 28 at 8 p.m. at Acre 121
—
Also opening for the holidays: Quentin Tarantino’s 70mm roadshow presentation of The Hateful Eight. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
