Results tagged “movies>”

It's difficult to enter into Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans expecting a comedy. That's despite a title more ridiculous and unwieldy than even a CSI spin-off would accept, and a trailer that features star Nicolas Cage waxing rhapsodic on his lucky crack pipe, and instructing some henchmen to shoot a dead body again, because the victim's "soul is still dancing." This has to be meant for laughs, right? The lingering expectation of a gritty drama lies mostly in this film's status as an ostensible remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 cult favorite, the Harvey Keitel tour-de-force Bad Lieutenant, and in Herzog's reputation for dark and sober dramas about outsized obsessive personalities.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

With all the cycling-related news in recent weeks – the 15th Street contraflow lane; Mayor Adrian Fenty's police-escorted daytime training rides; Capitol Hill Bikes closing its doors; Tweed – we'd be remiss in not mentioning that the Bicycle Film Festival is coming to the District.

The Messenger starts with loss, as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery (Ben Foster) has one last bittersweet meeting with his girlfriend, who met another man while he was off to war. It's a gentle way of ushering the audience into a movie that is all about loss on a larger scale. For soon after his return from the war, with injuries that nearly took away an eye and his ability to walk, Montgomery is assigned to the Army's Casualty Notification service, bringing news of the deaths of soldiers in the field to their families back home.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

There’s a huge star at the center of the Sydney Theatre Company’s much-hyped, Liv Ullman-directed, wholly satisfying new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, which sold out its Kennedy Center run before the curtain rose on the first preview. I speak, of course, of the dramatist Tennessee Williams.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Admittedly, it's been quite a while since I was in the lower level of Union Station, but I was pretty surprised to read in this Washington Post story that the Union Station 9 movie theater only finally closed on Oct. 12. Weren't we talking about this place shutting down over a year ago? I honestly didn't realize it was still open up until this month, but like I said, I really haven't been down there in a while. I'm sure regular denizens of the downstairs food court will happily tell me all about it.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

"I didn't do anything!" is the repeated mantra of Larry Gopnik, a nebbishy professor of physics at a suburban Minneapolis community college, and the central character of the Coen brothers' A Serious Man. And if he didn't do anything, as he keeps suggesting, then why is it that so many awful things keep happening to him? How could Hashem (the Jewish word for God, one of a handful of Yiddish vocabulary words Goys are likely to learn from the movie) be so cruel? His wife is leaving him, he's broke, his kids are ungrateful brats whose only use for him is to steal money from his wallet and send him up to the roof to adjust the aerial so they can watch F-Troop, he's a victim of extortion and a plot to sabotage his bid for tenure, and his freeloading mental-case of a brother tends to hog the bathroom to suction fluid from a cyst on the back of his neck.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

If you've been up at the intersection of 18th Street and Columbia Road NW today, you've no doubt noticed the freestanding scaffolding and truck parked there on the plaza. No, it's not construction beginning on the controversial plaza sculpture (that's been tabled for the moment), but rather a temporary art installation — or advertisement, depending upon your level of cynicism — from HBO and their "Imagine" project.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Left wing propagandist, or righteous speaker of truth to power? Hypocritical blowhard or man of the people? Egotisical hack or talented documentarian? Chances are you already have a strong opinion about Michael Moore, and already know if you're planning to check out his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story. The film met with warm receptions at the Cannes and Venice film festivals, winning the Little Golden Lion Award at the latter. Notices in the U.S. have also been positive, though slightly more mixed — those on the Continent have always been more inclined to laud Moore's films, as they are with Woody Allen and Jerry Lewis as well. Moore and Allen we get; Lewis, not so much.

Earlier this month at a D.C. screening at National Geographic's headquarters, director Cherien Dabis said that watching films like Truffaut's The 400 Blows were what finally allowed her to make her first feature. Realizing that one really could make a great story out of the experiences of one's own life, Dabis decided to write what she knew. Of course, for every Truffaut there are a hundred writers and filmmakers for whom "write what you know" is a recipe for self-indulgent art-as-therapy. Great for your own personal journey, usually a drag for the rest of us. Which is why it's always such a joy when movies tagged as "semi-autobiographical" turn out as thoroughly winning as Dabis' Amreeka.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Most people would probably look at the story of Mark Whitacre, the Archer Daniels Midland executive who donned a wire for the FBI in the early '90s and became the most famous (and highest ranking) corporate whistleblower in history, and see it as a tragedy. Between what it has to say about willful corporate corruption as well as about the ravages of mental illness, a film treatment of Whitacre's story could have easily been a dark and sobering look into international conspiracy and one man's precipitous downfall. But Director Steven Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns looked at the story, as told in Kurt Eichenwald's bestselling book, and decided it was a laugh-out-loud comedy. Though they did keep the "dark" intact.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Imagine for a moment that you're sitting in your rather modestly sized one bedroom apartment. Now imagine being in that space and being surrounded by over 4000 paintings, sculptures, and other pieces of modern art. So much art, in fact, stacked in every corner, to the ceilings, in every conceivable space, that when you donate it to one of the largest museums in the country, they don't have room to accept it all. The art itself may be Minimalist, but there's nothing minimal about that mental picture.

Beaches of Agnès

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

What's the best way to deal with those especially dark nights of the soul? Get rid of the soul, of course. That's the premise of French filmmaker Sophie Barthes' debut feature, a surreal blend of witty comedy and reflective — please excuse the expression — soul searching.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

This summer's resurrected, but truncated, Screen on the Green was by all accounts a big success, even if that final one last Monday happened to fall on the hottest, stickiest night of the year. So we can hardly blame SOTG co-saviors Comcast for going down to the National Mall with their cameras to capture some film goers giving them the love. But! At the end of the video below, the cameras are pointed toward a group of people purportedly doing "the HBO Dance" during the little musical interlude before the film begins, and there's maybe one person in there doing it correctly. People, people: the HBO Dance is not a freeform, wiggly enterprise comprised of flailing about however you feel like it. When done properly, the HBO Dance is more of a jazzercise move: you put your arms straight above your head, wave them back and forth to the beat of the music, and hop up and down with both feet. That's it. No spaghetti arms, no hip shaking, and for cryin' out loud, no twisting. Let's keep this sorry display in mind for next year, everyone.

Animated children's movies generally fall into one of a couple of different camps. There are kiddie flicks made just for kids, the sort of things that are visually stimulating enough to warrant 24/7 viewing by obsessive 3 to 5-year-olds, but which quickly lose their luster for anyone older. Then there are kids films that try to maintain some adult appeal, either through artful attention to great storytelling (Pixar) or through hammy pop culture references that go stale within a month of release (the collected works of Shrek). Hayao Miyazaki's latest, yet another in a long line of instant classics, fits neither of these molds: it is clearly made with children in mind, but not because it favors visual flash over storytelling, or because it is dumbed down in any way. Ponyo is that rare children's movie that actually taps into the unique imaginative power of a child's mind.

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Most of America only really knows two things about Marion Barry: he was once the District of Columbia's mayor, and he seemingly can't stay out of trouble with the law. With yesterday's HBO premiere of the new documentary, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry, it's likely that many people have gained a broader sense of who Barry was and what he once represented for the District. But even with the additional context provided by the film, it's less likely that all that many people will become more sympathetic to the aging local politico and his persistent troubles.