DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Edukators The truest sign that a film has managed to give a balanced treatment to divisive issues is if people on both sides accuse it of pandering. Such was the case with The Edukators, a fantastic, rough-edged film that came out of Germany in 2004. The plot concerns a trio of would-be bohemian revolutionaries: the......

An unnamed couple takes a romantic stroll among the frozen horse-heads. It'll all make perfect sense -- maybe -- after you've seen Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg. It's not really a documentary. It's not exactly a memoir. It is ingenious and poetic. Frequently it's apeshit hilarious. But, like, what the hell is this thing? Guy Maddin’s dreamy, beguiling My Winnipeg opens with the iconoclastic filmmaker employing the most loathsome directorial tactic there is: The camera fixes......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. My Life to Live The AFI has returned to it's regular presenting schedule, which means that their Godard retrospective continues marching on. It's rather appropriate that My Life to Live is the first film to screen after the documentary festival: Godard infused his fourth feature with a realistic energy that came directly from the cinéma vérité......

Meryl Streep as Mother Courage in John Walter's absorbing, perceptive Theater of War. There are documentaries that entertain and many more that educate, and there are plenty that grab you by the lapels and spout hummus-breath in your face about how you need to stop eating meat and trade your vulgar, barbarous combustion-powered vehicle in for a bike — today! Then there are the rare documentaries that prod you, subtly but insistently, to reexamine the......

There has been no shortage of filmed analysis of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath during the last three years. And much of it has been quite good, particularly Spike Lee's sprawling (and riveting) four-hour documentary, When the Levees Broke, which also screened at SILVERDOCS this year. But one doesn't really realize what's missing from these other films until watching Trouble the Water, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's take on the material, which is both harrowing......

Joanna Rudnick ponders whether to keep her breasts and ovaries in In the Family at SILVERDOCS. If the measure of a good film is that you're still thinking about it days later, then In the Family is the best movie I've seen all year. But in no small way was this documentary, directed by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, more or less tailor made to hit someone like me square in the jaw. Rudnick, all of......

Fidelis Cloer takes aim at competition seen and unseen in Bulletproof Salesman. “I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company.......

In case you hadn't noticed, SILVERDOCS is in full swing now, and it's been occupying all of our film-going attention this week. While D.C. has no shortage of film festivals throughout the year, there is none as good as SILVERDOCS, so we have trouble thinking of movies in any other terms while the festival is occupying Silver Spring. It's also an endurance test just trying to see all the films one wants to in the......

Director Alex Gibney (who we interviewed earlier this year) is making a mounting case for a future legacy as the first great documentarian of the 21st century. Hot on the heels of his incisive investigations into the collapse of a major corporation and the collapse of America's wartime moral compass, Gibney has switched gears. Rather than going after an entity whose misdeeds he feels are in dire need of being exposed, he has made what......

With the recent cinematic dramatizations of the life of Che Guevara, from his early days as a road tripping med student in the excellent The Motorcycle Diaries to Steven Soderbergh's lengthy version of his revolutionary years in the four and a half hour biopic that just premiered at Cannes, an unusual perspective was obviously necessary to any documentary version of his story to keep it from seeming stale or overly academic in comparison. And......

As you probably noticed from our first review this morning, the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival is now underway in Silver Spring, Md. The festival runs beginning today through Monday, June 23, and presents 108 documentary films over the course of the week. Now in its sixth year, SILVERDOCS is by far and away the classiest and best run film festival the D.C. metro area has to offer, and DCist will be crawling all over......

Yoko Ono, George Martin, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the Las Vegas premiere of Love, the subject of the documentary All Together Now. Combining the music of the most beloved band in the world with the most visually arresting live performance troupe working today seems like a surefire recipe for a hit. That's probably what the late George Harrison and Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté thought when they first dreamed up the......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Strait-Jacket You know what's missing from the modern cinema? Middle aged women who can play good old-fashioned, over-the-top, campy batshit insane. Where are the Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords for the 21st Century? Must we really wait 30 years for Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears to star in a remake of What Ever Happened to Baby......

National Geographic is kicking China Revealed this week, a series that centers around two museum exhibitions which run from today through September 7, and a film program paired to each exhibit. Tonight, there's a presentation to introduce the museum's exhibit on the early 15th century Chinese explorer Zheng He; Friday at noon, the museum screens a documentary following National Geographic photographer Mike Yamashida as he retraces many of Zheng's travels. And tomorrow, there's a presentation......

This seems to be the summer to see James Bond outdoors. Not only are there three neighborhood film festivals showing nothing but Bond films all summer long, but Screen on the Green just released the schedule for their 9th year of films on the National Mall, and who should be heading up the list but Mr. Shaken-Not-Stirred himself. What, was MGM offering a discount on print rentals this year? At least it's a Connery flick;......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. It Came From Beneath the Sea Of all the museum film programs in town, the Hirshhorn is the best for a wildly eclectic mix of films, ranging from more high-minded programs like their stellar Cinema Effect exhibit to fun fare such as their screening of a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark made by a......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington The common knock against Frank Capra is that his films are sappy, sentimental pieces in which the American Dream always prevails. The good guys and bad guys are always clearly defined, and the iron-clad morality of the former always trumps the latter. But who can really blame the guy? That's the......

Flickr contributor brownpau has been the star of the fledgling DCist Videos Pool for the past several weeks, diligently posting short videos of his travels around town for our amusement. We were disappointed to have missed his timelapse of Pope Benedict XVI's popemobile ride until it was too late, but over the weekend he added something I've always meant to try to capture on video: one of the Red line Metro tunnel ads in......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Son of Rambow This appears to be, hands-down, the cutest movie that will be released all year. Two skinny British kids with an (unhealthy?) obsession with Stallone's second most famous alter-ego decide to make a Rambo-inspired action film of their own. It's the sort of thing that thousands of kids around the world probably did as......

Comic books are big business. Hell, they're doing so well that they're giving the things away. The king of the comic business, Marvel, is so flush that they decided that instead of letting big movie studios buy the rights to their stories, they'd expand the movie arm of their operation into a full-fledged studio and just make them on their own. And if anyone doubted the studio's ability to make that leap, their first effort,......

Antonio Gaudí While Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for his surreal and beautiful Woman in the Dunes, he also created one of the most enigmatic architecture documentaries ever put to film with his profile of the equally enigmatic Spanish architect Antionio Gaudí. The AFI is drawing their short retrospective on the director to a close this weekend with two screenings of the film, which is more visual fantasia than informative biography. In fact,......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Filmfest DC Tonight is opening night for Filmfest DC, which goes until May 3. The opening selection is French director Phillipe Faucon's Two Ladies, and over the next week and a half the festival screens over 70 features, plus shorts, at venues all over town. The international film festival has a concentration on Latin American film......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Night of the Hunter It seems that there have been a lot of film noir picks in this column in recent months, and the AFI's current Robert Mitchum retrospective isn't exactly helping us break the habit. This week, though, features the best of the lot, with Mitchum's chilling turn as a Gospel-spouting murderer who marries......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Girls Rock! In the summer of 2001, the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls started up a camp in Portland, Oregon for girls ages 8-18 to learn to be rockers. It was about more than just music; girls were shown that not only were they just as able as boys to be in bands (no matter......

Ilana Trachtman is a television documentary producer by trade, but when presented with the story of Lior Liebling, she jumped into the choppier waters of independent filmmaking for the opportunity to make her debut feature. Lior is a young man with Down Syndrome, born to two Reconstructionist Jewish rabbis in Philadelphia. From an early age, he showed an unusually ardent interest in davening, the recitation of Jewish liturgical prayers, reciting the melodic prayers along with......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. In Glorious Technicolor A lot of the romance associated with Hollywood's so-called Golden Age has a lot to do with the visual look of the films. And that distinctive look, with hyper-saturated colors that seemed oh-so-glamorous in comparison with the muted tones of everyday life, was a result of the distinctive film process that made the......

Good news came to us earlier this week via Going Out Gurus about plans from the owners of the Arlington Cinema 'n' Drafthouse (or, as many we know refer to it, the "drunk theater") to open a new location. And the expansion won't just be another single screen affair like their current digs. It's to be a six screen megaplex of movies 'n' beer, taking over the space about to be vacated by the P&G......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Paranoid Park Gus Van Sant must feel like he has a lot of artistic penance to pay. Ever since the backlash over his remake of Psycho and the tired, sickly sweet inspirational sports/school clichés of Finding Forrester, the director has retreated into a self-imposed anti-commercial exile. The three previous features he's made during the '00s have......

One of the unfortunate bits of collateral damage associated with the closing of Dr. Dremo's was that the Washington Psychotronic Film Society was rendered homeless as well. WPFS has been in operation in the D.C. area for 20 years now, and housed their weekly screenings of eclectic films at Dremo's since 2000. For my own part, I can remember discovering them around that time, as I was a frequent visitor to the downstairs pool room......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Funny Games It's a shame that the Goethe Institut's Michael Haneke retrospective (which, by the way, is still going on) didn't include a screening of his bracing 1997 film Funny Games, if only to provide easy side-by-side comparison with the higher profile English-language remake hitting theaters today. Now, normally we have a built in skepticism when......