DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Religulous Anyone with any familiarity with Bill Maher through his HBO talk show or its previous, less profane incarnation on network TV, Politically Incorrect, probably already has a sense of whether or not they'll enjoy Religulous. Maher has made no secret of his views on religion and what he sees as its incongruous place in a......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Trouble the Water One of the hottest tickets of the SILVERDOCS film festival earlier this year was Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's moving documentary on Hurricane Katrina, which we reviewed in June. The buzz beforehand was that the pair had broken the mold in their look at the tragedy, giving viewers a rare look at things......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Berlin Alexanderplatz We're issuing a challenge to Popcorn & Candy readers this week: attend this week's featured film. Sound easy? Well, there's a catch. Our first pick this week is Berlin Alexanderplatz, the magnum opus of German filmmaking maniac Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an adaptation of Alfred Döblin's epic, Ulysses-esque 1929 novel about a small time crook's......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Rashomon After a decade of being largely recognized only in his native Japan, Akira Kurosawa's coming out party on a more worldwide scale was a monumental achievement. Rashomon's influence reaches far beyond just film, its name having long ago become synonymous with the idea of differing perspectives on a single event, which is the central point......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Blow-Up Michelangelo Antonioni made three English-language films during the course of his career. These three were made from 1966-1975, as part of a contract with MGM undoubtedly designed to try to cash in on his popularity in the foreign art-house circles by making some higher-profile pictures with bigger English and American stars. And it worked with......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Reds This week at Popcorn & Candy we bring to a close our completely unintentional three week series of leading with Communism-linked films. And Warren Beatty's career-peak Reds is a fitting trilogy conclusion, as it combines elements from both featured films of the last two weeks. Reds and Zhivago share a common setting (the Russian Revolution)......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Trumbo While not necessarily a household name when it comes to American patriots, novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo earned the title. Caught squarely in the House Un-American Activities Committee's crosshairs during the early days of the red scare, Trumbo was one of ten industry figures jailed for refusing to give testimony before the committee. At a......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Doctor Zhivago My earliest distinct memory of seeing a movie in a theater is at the age of four or five. Was it the latest from Disney, or maybe a Lucas space opera? No, it was Doctor Zhivago, which was showing at the local college. Whether or not my mother—or the lack of a ready babysitter—can......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Man on Wire When I was eight, I visited the Grand Canyon with my mother, and the only way I'd get up to the edge was on hands and knees. If I went today, the result would probably be the same. You never know when a stray wind is going to whip up and cast you......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Apartment There's a scene early on in The Apartment where Jack Lemmon's C.C. Baxter is talking to the object of his affection, a certain Miss Kubelik, an elevator operator at his office played by Shirley MacLaine. Baxter reveals that his position at the insurance company they work for allows him access to employee files, and......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Parallax View This week in Popcorn & Candy, what's old is new again. We've got Cold War satire that's just as appropriate now, a TV series that was at its best in the '90s reborn on the big screen, and ancient Rome through the lens of the mid-20th century. But topping the list is Alan......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired Roman Polanski’s story is pretty familiar by now. Busted for sex with a minor and found guilty in a highly public trial, the director, during the prime of his career, fled to France to dodge a prison sentence and has never come back. Those are the basics, but just how accurate......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Hellboy II: The Golden Army So we're aware that none of you were planning on seeing any movies this week, as you're saving your money for at least a half-dozen viewings of The Dark Knight next weekend. Or was that just me? OK, the fact is that with two comic book movies already gone by this......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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......

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......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Let's Get Lost Viewing director and photographer Bruce Weber's footage of Chet Baker just a year before his death, it's hard not to be reminded of William S. Burroughs. Baker's face, ravaged by years of heroin addiction, had that same quality of gaunt and sagging flesh as Burroughs'. Both artists aged prematurely thanks to the junk......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Seventh Seal The Seventh Seal is one of those films that serves as a reminder of what a shame it is that film, in the United States anyway, tends to be ghettoized as little more than a vehicle for entertainment. Without getting into a whole debate over the declining status of arts and literature in......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Be Kind Rewind It appears that video tape will likely be to the generation currently growing up what 8-tracks were to my own. So it's probably time to prepare for the day when the only references to VHS in movies will come attached to anachronistic jokes at the expense of my own nostalgia. That's unlikely to......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Diary of the Dead: It warms our hearts that on this, that most romantic of holidays, George Romero has constructed another bloody festival of the undead. Because nothing says "I love you" quite like biting social commentary buried under multiple layers of rotting flesh, dismembered limbs, and rampant lust for fresh braaaiiiinns. For the fifth entry......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Bergman, Burnett, & the Coens at the AFI If you don't live near Silver Spring, you may want to think about just setting up camp there for the next month. After a slow January at the AFI Silver with a sparse selection of non-new releases, tonight the theater kicks off three month-long retrospectives full of fantastic......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: The National Gallery's English New Wave retrospective closes this weekend with, as far as this writer is concerned, the best film of the period. Alan Sillitoe's screenplay (from his own short story) concerns Colin Smith, a British youth whose skill for distance running is only matched by his ability......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Persepolis Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed graphic novel about her adolescence during the Iranian Revolution quickly reached the status of modern classic, and it appears the filmed version is headed in the same direction. Satrapi herself co-directed the adaptation, and instead of attempting to three-dimensionalize her bold black and white artwork, she and co-director Vincent Paronnaud opted to......