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

Major Release: No Country for Old Men

We’ll be covering the latest release from the Coen Brothers in more depth tomorrow, but in the time being, we’ll tell you this: not only have the filmmakers recovered from the mediocre doldrums of their last couple of outings, but they have returned with a bloody vengeance with a film that is a serious contender for the best film they’ve ever made. It’s also easily the best movie I’ve seen this year. The brothers replicate the tone of Cormac McCarthy’s lean and brutal novel with frightening accuracy. Ostensibly a simple tale of a drug deal gone wrong, subsequent hunt by the police and a terrifyingly remorseless bounty hunter, McCarthy’s novel and the Coen’s film turns an ordinary potboiler into a complex meditation on fate, good & evil, and the world’s tendency to slip away from our control and our understanding as we grow older. Why make the effort to go to the one theater in the area that’s playing at this week when it’ll expand to theaters around the area the week after? Because you’re going to want to see this one early, and often.

View the trailer.
Opens Friday only at E Street Cinema, expands to more theaters around the area next week.

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Special Event: Homefront: Stories of America at War

We’re all about the cinema experience here at Popcorn & Candy, and so we’re reticent to recommend staying home and turning on the television when there are so many good movies out there you could be watching. But we’ll break with tradition just this once to plug the work of a group of local student filmmakers from American University who have produced a documentary on the effects of the war in Iraq on people back home. With seven segments looking at soldiers after their return, families with sons and daughters on the front lines, and the lives of Muslim Americans during the war, it has the potential to be a powerful film. The film is hosted by NPR’s Bob Edwards, also an AU alumnus.

Airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on MHz Network, which is broadcast on the air on channel 56, and offered by most local cable providers.

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