Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

—

Johanna Korthals Altes and Vincent Nemeth are heavy-handed symbolic figures in FRANCOFONIA (Music Box Films)

Francofonia

Adolph Hitler rides around the Place de la Concorde, asking “Where is the Louvre?” This is one of the reenactments (in this case, an impersonator dubbing newsreel footage) in director Alexander Sokurov’s quasi-documentary essay on the nature of art and war. Francofonia is a fragmented portrait of Jacques Jaujard and Count Franziskus Wolff-Metternich, enemies who collaborated at the Louvre under Nazi occupation. It would be a great story if it wasn’t marred by the director’s navel-gazing, as he frames art history with the story of him making a film about art history. In the hands of the late Chris Marker, this would have been dense, fascinating material. But like Sokurov’s technically bold Russian Ark (2002), which told the story of the Hermitage in one unbroken, 99-minute shot, the director overwhelms his material with a voice that’s perhaps too clever—and this time his tricks aren’t as impressive.

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark Bethesda Row

—

Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, in another story about the white man behind the person of color who made it big. (Richard Blanshard/IFC Films)

The Man Who Knew Infinity

It’s Colonial India in 1913. College dropout Srinavasa (Dev Patel) works as a humble shipping clerk, but on his own time is a dedicated and lonely student of mathematics. After receiving a letter from the young genius, British professor G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) brings Srinavasa to Cambridge. The buzz on this biopic of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has been mixed; Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune calls it a “solid historical drama opposing racism, xenophobia, and weak math skills.” But Leigh Paatch of the Australian Herald Sun writes that, inevitably, “the numbers just don’t add up.”

Watch the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row.

—

Franco Nero

Django

Drifter Franco Nero wanders around a lawless countryside dragging a closed coffin in this influential spaghetti western. Jazz aficionados who recognize the drifter’s name may already know the anti-hero’s fate. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained borrowed the title song, font, and other elements from director Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film, but he unfortunately did not borrow Corbucci’s brutal efficiency. For the film’s 50th anniversary, the AFI Silver is showing it in a restored DCP.

Watch the trailer.
Saturday, May 7, Monday, May 9, and Tuesday, May 10 at the AFI Silver.

—

Maqbool

This month the AFI Silver hosts the Freer Gallery’s series The Bard in Bollywood, which gives local audiences a rare chance to see director Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy on 35mm film. Bhardwaj sets his 2003 adaptation of Macbeth among Mumbai gangsters. When Maqbool (Irrfan Khan of Slumdog Millionaire) falls into an affair with his boss’ mistress, she urges him to take over the business. The play’s three witches are represented by comic cops played by the great Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah.

Watch a clip.
Sunday, May 8 at 3:30 p.m. at the AFI Silver

The Carrier

Next week the Washington Psychotronic Film Society brings you the best in diseased entertainment. Their programmers write of The Carrier that, “After a freak encounter with some kind of alien/mutant/monster, social outcast, Jake contracts and unknowingly spreads a disease that causes people’s flesh to dissolve. Then the paranoia set in. Folks start turning on each other, dressing up in garbage bags, and using cats like canaries to identify infected objects. A surrealist nightmare, like watching a twisted medical epidemic version of Leave it to Beaver, but with violent gangs wrapped in plastic, disturbed fundamentalist religious cults and 1950’s social satire.”

Watch the trailer.
Monday, May 9 at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel.

—

Also opening this weekend, mutants run amok and fight amongst each other; I don’t mean Captain America: Civil War, but Men & Chicken, starring Mads Mikkelsen as a misfit with an unusual pastime. We’ll have a full review tomorrow. And Mount Pleasant’s indie theater Suns Cinema opens Sunday. read more about it here.