As we wrote last week, Eddie Murphy has been chosen to play Marion Barry in a Spike Lee-directed biopic on the mayor-for-life. So far, Barry has been quiet on this choice, but given this tweet he sent Lee on Sunday night, he must want to give the acclaimed director at least 140 characters of his mind on the matter. more ›

It was somewhat inevitable -- there have been books written about him, he's been a part of a reality show (about himself) and HBO made a well-received documentary about his political career and legacy. So it was only really a matter of time before someone thought to make a movie about Marion Barry. But should Eddie Murphy star? more ›

I'm generally a proponent of the notion that if there is information essential to the understanding of your movie that isn't contained in your movie, then there's a good chance you've failed to do your job as a filmmaker. Andrei Ujică's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu would be one of the exceptions to that rule. more ›

A large percentage of us spend our days in offices, so if a movie is going to spend much of its time there, it had better ring true. Lapses in accuracy about criminal underworlds might fly past us unnoticed, but lazy, fake workplace settings will take you out of the movie just as surely as a boom mike hanging in the frame or a reflection of a cameraman obviously visible in the mirror. more ›

You know this story and its elements by heart. A basically good-hearted hero with a dark side. A woman in trouble. A femme fatale. Powerful forces of evil conspiring to drag our hero to his demise. Quiet, atmospheric contemplation. Fast cars and city lights. Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is a 50s noir, filtered through a 70s existential thriller, all dressed up as a neon-bathed, synthesizer-scored 80s L.A. action flick. Yet no matter how well versed you are in its influences, you've never seen a movie quite like this before. more ›

If you're like me, you're tired of just having plain old IMAX in D.C., via the two traditional IMAX screens at the Smithsonian's Natural History and Air and Space museums. What do we want? The IMAX Experience®, of course, which just sounds sexier, and which you can get at the multiplex instead of having to go to a museum like some tourist. Well, our prayers have been answered, because we can begin experiencing® IMAX here in D.C. instead of just, oh, I don't know, watching it, starting on September 9, when a newly-outfitted IMAX-esque screen opens at the AMC Georgetown. more ›

Fred Cavayé's French thriller Point Blank has exactly the kind of no-frills, highly focused, adrenaline-fueled action that is missing or obscured in American summer thrill rides. more ›

Miranda July's The Future, with its talking cat and deadpan humor, might appear a standard exercise in indie quirk. Don't be fooled, though: there's melancholy magic in this movie. more ›

Much like planking, I don't claim to understand tarp-surfing. I just know that reader Andy Rothwell videotaped these people are doing it in the District of Columbia, and it looks like the kind of whimsical fun we should all be having instead of having to work on a Monday afternoon. more ›

Three college students making a documentary. Two men (including one bearded, easily-spooked cameraman), and a woman. Unspeakable danger lurking in the wilderness that's much more than they bargained for when they took up this school project. A framing story that says this is found footage, and that the students are missing. Twelve years after The Blair Witch Project and this meme, like any good horror monster, just won't die; though most of its imitators don't hew to the basic setup of the source material quite as faithfully as Trollhunter. more ›

A review of Terrence Malick's career-summarizing, cosmos-questioning, often-impenetrable film, which looks at the enormity of the entire universe via the intimate snapshot of one 1950s Texas family led by Brad Pitt. more ›

UPDATE (2:15 p.m.): Well, it appears that the video has been pulled from public view. (Can't say I blame whoever made that decision.) Instead, you'll just have to settle for the screencap we grabbed of the actor playing Condit putting something in the dumpster. more ›

Robert Redford's film version of the trial of Mary Surratt, for her part in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, makes a run at complete historical accuracy. It's success in that pursuit probably depends on how stringently you define historical accuracy, but its success as a drama requires it to meet entirely different standards. Is it up to either task? more ›

Credit director Joe Wright with trying to avoid pigeonholing himself. His first two films, the period dramas Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, garnered much critical love and comparisons to a previous British master of sumptuous, graceful period pieces, David Lean. Not content to play just to the Masterpiece Theatre set, he set his sights on more modern material -- with mixed results -- in The Soloist. And now, radically shifting genres yet again, Wright delivers a thoroughly breathtaking, heart-racing international espionage thriller with fairy-tale overtones and a thumping electronic soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers -- a band he used to work with in his pre-cinema days directing and crewing rave-inspired music videos that probably inform this work a great deal more than anything he's done in feature films. more ›

When I was around ten or eleven, all I really wanted for Christmas was a glaive. Now, if you immediately found yourself thinking, "Well, who didn't want a badass magical throwing weapon that looked like a jeweled starfish with knife blades, as featured in the 1983 box-office fantasy bomb Krull," then you've already passed the first trial in your quest to determine if you're part of the fairly narrow target audience for Your Highness. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, we may have to move on to other potential fan groups for this film, such as devotees of Your Highness star and co-writer Danny McBride's Eastbound and Down. Still nothing? Well, if you like getting high, this party's for you, too: "Highness" doesn't just refer to the McBride character's regal lineage. more ›

When Valerie (Amanda Seyfried) first lays eyes on the Big Bad Wolf, they share a lingering glance. They're probably both marveling at what big eyes the other has. The moment itself introduces a recurring motif in the film: whenever Valerie's trying to figure out if someone she's talking to might be the wolf, Catherine Hardwicke's camera pushes in on that person's eyes, as Valerie searches for any recognition. more ›

Before the first image hits the screen, director Icíar Bollaín sets the ideological tone for Even the Rain: A title card dedicates the film to Howard Zinn, the leftist historian and activist. Resoundingly anti-corporatist, anti-imperialist, and anti-globalization, one suspects Zinn would have been a fan of the film had it been made a year earlier. more ›

UPDATE: Fox 5 reports that the vehicle was indeed an Metropolitan Police Department SUV, and that the wreck was not supposed to happen.

There aren't a whole lot of big-time action movie shoots in D.C., so perhaps those tasked with keeping the line between filming and real life are a little rusty. A tipster sends in the above video, which appears to depict the yellow "Bumblebee" sports convertible, which will feature prominently in Transformers 3, t-boning a police cruiser which happened to be driving down 3rd Street SW during filming. The "Bumblebee" apparently was cruising down Maryland Avenue near the National Museum of the American Indian, when it stuck the police vehicle at the Avenue's intersection with 3rd Street. The above video was shot from the Voice of America building at 330 Independence Avenue SW. more ›

Do you have the next Small Press Expo marked on your calendar? Do you have Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men volumes, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the collected works of Douglas Coupland all placed on your top bookshelf, filed under "A" for "Awesome"? Do you have an original, operational Nintendo Entertainment System currently hooked up to your TV? Have you watched Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the entire run of Spaced within the past year? more ›

The first scene in Life During Wartime is a reprise of the unforgettable opening of Happiness, Todd Solondz's 1998 feature. Both are set in elegant restaurants, joining a dinner in the midst of an emotional moment. There are tears, a tentative, fumbling conversation, and a surprising emotional outburst. But even though both of these characters were in Happiness, and one of those characters was in that same opening scene, the actors are different. So it is with the rest of Life in Wartime, which picks up the lives of the Jordan sisters, the trio of Jersey women around whom the first film rotated, ten years after the events of that movie -- but with an entirely different cast. more ›

"Because it's there," is the iconic, oft-quoted, and possibly apocryphal answer given by George Mallory when asked why on Earth he'd want to try to get to the top of the 29,029-foot-tall Mount Everest. more ›

Maybe it's just that I was spoiled by Inception, by the notion that a summer action flick could be both thrilling and smart. But then again, that's also been the attraction of the Bourne series: the notion that adrenaline-based cinema doesn't have to come with the caveat that one has to check their brain at the door. Not that action films are universally smarter these days, but the mindless and the thoughtful are generally easy to separate: the A-Team? No frontal lobe required. A spy flick starring Angelina Jolie and directed by the (generally) thoughtful Phillip Noyce? There's a reasonable expectation of smart thrills going in. more ›

The latest cinematic puzzle-box from French director Alain Resnais shows the director -- now, at 87, rather staggeringly in his 7th decade of making movies -- still more than capable of creating films that are, at once, thought-provoking, engaging and thoroughly befuddling. Wild Grass is the first literary adaptation in that long career, taken from the novel L'Incident by Christian Gailly. Resnais seems intent on keeping the story's literary underpinnings intact, and does so through the constant use of narrations, both from a third person narrator and internal monologues from the characters themselves. more ›

Better living through genetic engineering takes a serious hit in Vincenzo Natali's Splice, a seriously creepy and surprisingly effective science-gone-awry thriller. There's a certain 50's B-movie sensibility going on here: where films like Godzilla or Them! expressed a public's fears about the dangers of radiation, creating mutated monsters that threaten to bring down humanity, Natali's film does the same with gene-splicing. Here, two hot-shot young geneticists, Clive and Elsa (Adrien Brody & Sarah Polley), throw a bunch of species in a DNA blender to try to farm a protein from the resulting organism that can be used to treat a wide range of human illnesses. more ›

>> During her service as ambassador to the United Nations, and then as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright came to understand how powerful a symbol an item of jewelry could be, and chose pins to reflect her diplomatic mission, reinforce her negotiating position, or express her pride of country and office. At the Smithsonian Castle view a selection of these pins in Read My Pins: The Madeleine Albright Collection. Opening June 18. more ›

When Animal Collective came to the 9:30 Club last spring, the show sold out before I.M.P.'s email blast had even announced the soft sale. But when the band's new visual album, Oddsac, hit the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring on Wednesday, there were enough empty seats in the house that one of the movie's promoters encouraged the 8 p.m. audience members to stay for the 10 p.m. screening. more ›

If you ever laughed uncontrollably while engaged in a childhood snowball fight, built intricate forts out of your grandmother's afghan blankets, or made up the rules to complex playground games while the game was still being played, then Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is for you. Actually, even if you never did those things, but still have a strong nostalgic attachment to Maurice Sendak's classic picture book, the movie is still yours. What's less clear is whether it is geared toward children still engaged in all that creative play and discovering the book for the first time. Regrettably, I'm no longer eight and can't say for sure what a child's reaction to this movie might be. I suspect — or maybe, rather, hope — that kids will respond to it despite the fact that it isn’t paced or presented like most children’s movies, and will grow to love it more and more as they grow older. more ›

When Michael Moore went looking for funding for his newest film, he claims he told the studio that it would be a kind of sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11, the director's most financially successful film to date. They handed over the cash, and he turned around and made a film that has little to do with that anti-Bush polemic, that is instead unapologetic about biting the corporate hands that feed him. That doesn't mean that Capitalism: A Love Story isn't a sequel, though. It's just that its direct antecedent is Moore's debut (and arguably still his best), Roger & Me, which was released 20 years ago this December. more ›

DCist witnessed D.C. Police escorting the production trailers for the Untitled James L. Brooks Project out of Adams Morgan last night, and we've since heard stars Jack Nicholson, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd have moved on to other locations, including spots along the 14th Street NW corridor (trucks are lined up today from at least R Street up to T Street), while other scenes will be filmed inside the lobby and outside of the office building at 875 15th Street NW, aka The Bowen Building, for big chunks of the weekend -- a security notice sent to workers in the McPherson Square-adjacent building says they'll be there pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday, and then again overnight at the end of next week. more ›

We hope a few current and former D.C. Council members didn't storm the WTOP newsroom with pitchforks today. Reporter Mark Segraves penned a sort of comedy post for his far too rarely updated Malcontent Minute blog/online column where he suggests casting choices for a movie about local D.C. politics. Naturally, the story would revolve around Marion Barry, and he picks Don Cheadle to play the flamboyant former mayor and current Council member, which sounds about right. But the ladies of the D.C. Council don't fare quite as well with Segraves in the casting chair. He chooses the not exactly well-liked (and not exactly an actress) Star Jones of The View to play Linda Cropp, even going so far as to mention that she'd need to get her gastric bypass reversed to pull off the role. Perhaps even more harsh is his suggestion that former Golden Girl Bea Arthur should play Carol Schwartz. Bea Arthur is 86 years old, while Schwartz is only 64. Brutal. Other, less totally mean casting suggestions include Russell Simmons as Anthony Williams, Hillary Swank as Cathy Lanier, and Morgan Freeman plus 50-pounds as Charles Ramsey. more ›