DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week, with a look at food, the future, and Oscar nominated shorts. more ›

Pina, Wim Wenders' gorgeous 3D document of the Tanztheatre Wuppertal, might not leave you in tears, but it may well convert the uninitiated: fans of Wenders who know nothing of the late choreographer; devotees of Bausch unfamiliar with the German’ director’s arthouse favorites Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club; and finally, film skeptics who feel 3D adds nothing but a gimmick to the moviegoing experience. more ›

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

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

Everyone has made difficult choices and faced the consequences. But those choices and their consequences can be different in a place like Iran, a theme that carries Asghar Farhadi's insightful new movie, A Separation. more ›

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

If you head over to the IMDb, look up Roger Corman, and start scrolling through his filmography, make sure your scrolling finger is limbered up. The list of producing credits alone stretches, as of this writing, to 398. And Corman, well into his 80s now, is still consistently averaging two to three movies a year. Many of those aren't just putting-up-the-money executive producer credits, either. Corman, as Alex Stapleton's documentary Corman's World demonstrates in its opening minutes, is a hands-on producer, offering directorial input onset (keep scrolling down the page and you'll find over 50 directorial credits from 1955-1990), and sitting with the editor and guiding the cutting process. more ›

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

Many of the scenes in Pariah, Dee Rees' debut narrative feature, are shot in shallow focus closeups, actors' faces filling much of the screen as the background is lost in a soft blur. It's an unforgiving shot for an actor, every subtlety -- and, potentially, deficiency -- of their performance magnified by the proximity of the viewer. But what it demonstrates is an overriding confidence in the abilities of her performers on the part of Rees. That confidence isn't misplaced: The intensity of these performances, and their gorgeous rendering on film by cinematographer Bradford Young, carry a film that could easily have sunk into Sundance-indie inspirational cliché. more ›

Can the rich imagery of Haruki Murakami's complex novels be well served by the movie camera? We find out with an adaptation of Norwegian Wood. more ›

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

Never mind the naysayers who complain there are never any good movies, Ian Buckwalter says. This was an extraordinary year for film. And here are Buckwalter's favorites of 2011. But for some reason that complaint particularly irks me this year because it's not just a case of it being a pretty much normal year and that some people will never be happy. It's that this was an extraordinary year for film, and I just can't fathom anyone who cares about movies looking at this year's roster -- admittedly, making sure to look past many of the wide releases -- and not being ecstatic at what they see. more ›

Pat Padua's list of the best films of 2011 does not include mainstream darlings like Hugo, The Artist or Meek's Cutoff. But it does include some titles you might not find on any other critic's list. more ›

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week, including holiday classics, bodily transformation and romance—sometimes in the same movie! more ›

The Hollywood adaptation of the Stieg Larsson bestseller might not have been needed considering a Swedish-language film in 2009, but David Fincher's efficient direction is more than welcome. more ›

You could spend an entire essay talking about the visual detail of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. This is a film that never needs a word to express that it's not just about the Cold War, but about cold men, cold interactions, a cold decade. There's the grey, muted color scheme that creates an eternal autumn out of the entirety of the 70s. The pale, doughy faces of men who look as if they've never seen the sun, faces sitting under bad haircuts and worse combovers, sequestered in smoky, soundproof underground rooms discussing the activities of their intelligence counterparts in other countries, who are likely also overwhelmingly pale, male, and grimly disaffected. The wallpaper is textured, the filing cabinets metallic and industrial, and the secretarial pool seems designed to take leering gazes just as much as they take dictation. more ›

Some biopics are destined to end up as educational supplements for teachers looking to engage students in a subject with a little more entertainment value than a lecture can provide. David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method at times almost seems to be playing directly to that market. This loose history of the evolution of the working relationship between two of the 20th century's most prominent psychoanalysts -- Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) --practically follows a Psych 101 syllabus: Freud's obsessions with both relating all psychological issues back to sex; his rigid categorizations; Jung's uncertainty about those simplistic assessments; Jung's fascination with parapsychological phenomenon and the resulting battle for the heart of psychology as hard science or metaphysical theorizing. more ›

Mavis Gary, author of a once-popular series of young adult novels, is 37 years old. What that probably means, even though Jason Reitman's new film doesn't address it explicitly, is that she's just a year shy of her 20th high school reunion. With that in mind, many of the events of Young Adult feel like a last ditch attempt to prepare for going back home and facing friends with impending middle age suddenly feeling uncomfortably and uncontrollably close. The years that seemed like eons to accomplish her ambitions vanished, and, in the grips of alcoholism, arrested development, and cold sweat panic, Mavis (Charlize Theron) decides the best course of action is to retreat from the big city for a little while and head back to the her small town roots. Oh, and while she's there, to steal her high school sweetheart away from his wife and infant daughter. If she could pull it off, she'd sure make a splash at that hypothetical reunion next year. more ›

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

The Lincoln Theatre will next week open what will presumably be a popular ticket. Starting Dec. 21, the Lincoln will begin running David Fincher's new film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. more ›

In the Post on Sunday, Ned Martel lamented the fact that Washington moviegoers still have to wait behind New York and Los Angeles audiences for new films. Besides his kvetching about release dates, Martel suggested some 2012 releases he feels will do especially well with Washington viewers. more ›

A detective walks into a bar wearing a black suit, hat, tie, and trenchcoat, carrying nothing but a pineapple. No, that's not the setup for a joke. Rather, that is the joke, or at least the source of laughs in once scene from Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre. It's a deadpan and strange little sight-gag, and typifies the kind of offbeat humor the Finnish director is known for. Showing the absurd in a stripped-down, matter-of-fact fashion is how Kaurismäki gets his laughs, even as he tells a story with serious themes. more ›

Let me just clear one thing up, lest there be any confusion a few paragraphs down the page. The Sitter isn't a great film. In all likelihood, it may not even be a very good film. But the mostly-praise you're about to read about this movie is a reflection of the fact that despite its deficiencies -- and they are many -- this film is a dumb comedy made by smart people who know how to make you have fun despite what might be in your best interest. more ›

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

If you haven't yet watched The Artist, maybe you should -- the region's local film critics chose it as their 2011 pick of the year. more ›

Addictions are time-consuming disorders. There's the time spent finding the object(s) of your addiction, the time spent actually engaging in them, the time spent dealing with the highs and lows, and the time required to cover up and compensate for all of those activities in your straight life. Of course, life in general can be hard enough to keep everything balanced; add in an addiction, and there's that many more balls to keep in the air. Steve McQueen's new film, Shame, shows what happens when they all come crashing down. more ›

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week, including fatherhood, punk rock style. more ›

Martin Scorsese hardly seems the most obvious choice for a whimsical 3-D children’s movie about a big-eyed, scruffy-haired young scamp who winds the clocks of a Paris train station, but for the movie that Hugo becomes, there's no one else for the job. more ›

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week on glorious 35mm film. more ›

General funnyman and puppet connoisseur Jason Segal is apparently coming to town tomorrow night to unveil the latest Muppets movie. more ›