Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
AIEEEEEEEEE!!!!! (Abramorama)
The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years
Director Ron Howard’s latest is a documentary about the Fab Four’s all-too-brief life on the road, from 1962-1966. Thrill to live footage and scream in the theater to be part of a pop culture hysteria the likes of which we may never see again. Note: certain shows at the Avalon and the AFI will include 30 minutes of rare footage of the Beatles’ 1965 concert at Shea Stadium. Check the theater for showtimes. And in case you missed it, read the incredible story of the Washington teens who pretended to be members of the band the Cyrkle in order to meet the Beatles.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Thursday at the AFI Silver, iPic Pike and Rose, and Angelika Mosaic; opens Friday at the Avalon.
Laura Albert, Savannah Knoop and Asia Argento (Amazon Studios/Magnolia Pictures)
As a teenager, Laura Albert met her husband-to-be Geoff at a screening of Quadrophenia and pretended to be British, all the better to impress a young Anglophile punk. It was four months before Geoff learned that Laura wasn’t British. Laura always seemed to be creating characters, and her most ambitious invention is the subject of this fascinating documentary. Author JT LeRoy was once the darling of literati like authors Dennis Cooper and Mary Karr, and drew raves from Hollywood types like Winona Ryder. But LeRoy was the creation of an author who didn’t feel comfortable in her own body and created the literary persona of an androgynous hustler born of a truck-stop. Like it’s subject, Author takes on different identities: a scathing indictment of celebrity endorsement culture and an expose of a hoax, before it becomes a sober look at an author (Arthur) so uncertain of who she is that she pathologically creates someone else. Director Jeff Feuerzeig uses the now standard documentary tricks of animation to mix up the talking heads format, but some of the most compelling sequences of the film are simply shots of cassettes playing some of the many interviews that Albert recorded with celebrities taken in by her ruse. A ruse that continues, to some extent, with the making of this film: Courtney Love and Asia Argento, among others, are furious that Albert recorded conversations without their permission. Does the entertaining end justify the questionable means? Whatever you think of Albert’s deceit, it’s hard to look away from Author.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday at Landmark E Street Cinema.
(The Orchard)
This Polish-Israeli thriller about love and real estate is a moody variation on the dybbuk, and it wasn’t the only film in this year’s DC Jewish Film Festival to tackle that Jewish legend; but it’s the first one to get a commercial release. In February, I wrote that, ” On his wedding night, a young groom (Itay Tiran) finds human bones on his bride’s family farm and becomes possessed by the spirit of a jilted bride. Director Marcin Wrona and cinematographer Pawel Flis establish a sinister atmosphere, but the characters are not fully developed and the horror is more creepy than frightening. Still, the movie comes off like a strange, unsettled marriage between My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Carnival of Souls.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday at Landmark E Street Cinema
(The Criterion Collection)Young Pawel’s father is a semantics professor who understands the world through science; his aunt uses faith to find her answers. This weekend, the AFI screens new digital restorations of director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part series of films based on the Ten Commandments. Originally made for television, these films have been called “one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements in visual storytelling.”
Watch the trailer.
September 16-22 at the AFI Silver.
Guo Yue in ‘Kaili Blues,’ September 25 at Landmark E Street Cinema (Grasshopper Film)
The third annual edition of this festival launches next weekend with a week of fiction and documentary features as well as animated and experimental shorts. Spotlight screenings include director Wu Tianming’s final film, Song of the Phoenix (September 22 at Landmark E Street Cinema) , about a young musician who finds that the traditional instrument he plays is no longer in fashion in a modern China; The Chinese Mayor (September 24 at E Street), a documentary about a former mining town and its attempts to be transformed into a tourist center; and Kaili Blues (September 25 at E Street), about a doctor who tried to find his brother’s abandoned child only to find himself in a dreamlike town.
Watch the trailer for Kaili Blues
September 19-25 at Landmark E Street Cinema. Full schedule and tickets here.
The AFI Silver’s 27th annual Latin American Film Festival starts tomorrow. Titled after the Venezuelan town situated against the border of Colombia, this opening night selection is adapted from the true story of a 1988 massacre that saw a group of fishermen gunned down by the army on the Aruca River. The accepted cover story is that these men, completely average townspeople, were actually secret guerrilla fighters. Two men survive the shooting, but are held in jail and pressured to admit their true allegiance. With their entire town and a passionate police officer on their side, the men struggle to cling to honesty while pervasive forces try to make them accept a false reality. Director Rober Calzadilla gives this harrowing tale the matter of fact staging of a docudrama, allowing the events to speak with little editorializing. On paper, El Amparo has the potential to be an awards season groaner, exploiting real life tragedy for cheap gravitas, but in execution it succeeds as a solemn monument to integrity and honor. As one man asks of the prisoners when they refuse to change their “story,” “What do we do with the truth?” In El Amparo, we protect it, and those who dedicate themselves to upholding it.—Dominic Griffin
Thursday, September 15, 2016 at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
Note: the film will be shown in its proper aspect ratio
Tickets are already gone for the series of Prince and Davie Bowie films I’ll be hosting at the Library of Congress in November (although standbys are encouraged to line up starting at 6:30 p.m.). But seats are always available for the Pickford Theatre’s monthly series of new preservation prints. Tomorrow night’s film is a pre-code satire of the film industry’s transition from silents to talkies. This was the first collaboration between legendary writers Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. preceded by the 1933 Hal Roach short, “Maids a la Mode,” starring ZaSu Pitts.
Thursday, September 15 at 7 p.m at the Mary Pickford Theatre, third floor of the Madison Building, Library of Congress. Free. Seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
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Also this week, stay tuned for a fuller preview of the Latin American Film Festival tomorrow; and on Friday, come back for reviews of Oliver Stone’s Snowden; and the hip-hop coming of age movie Kicks.
