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

Repertory: The 400 Blows

Expect to see plenty of French New Wave retrospectives over the next year or so, as 2008 represents the movement’s 50th anniversary. If Claude Chabrol’s 1958 Le Beau Serge lit the fuse, François Truffaut’s 400 Blows was the first in a subsequent series of cinematic explosions that announced France’s new generation of filmmakers to the world. Truffaut’s debut feature is a remarkable achievement on a number of levels, not least of which is how fresh and vibrant and new it feels even a half-century after its release.

The film is a semi-autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s own troubled childhood, as his onscreen alter ego Antoine Doinel is born to an already broken home, raised by a number of relatives along with his own selfish mother and surly stepfather, and ultimately placed unceremoniously in a reformatory after a series of incidents of delinquency and petty theft. The film was not only one of the kickoffs of the New Wave and the strong opening to Truffaut’s career, but also initiated one of the most fruitful director-actor relationships in film (at least until Martin Scorcese met Robert DeNiro), as Truffaut would go on to make five more features and one short with Jean-Pierre Léaud, the 14-year old unknown he picked for the lead role in The 400 Blows. And four of those six would be the further adventures of Antoine Doinel, as Truffaut continued to make films about his alter ego for 20 years. If you’ve never seen this one before, you owe it to yourself to make it up to the AFI this week, and if you’re already familiar, you already know this bears repeated viewings.

View the trailer.
Playing at the AFI for a special one-week engagement starting tonight through December 13.

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Foreign: Fimfárum

For the past year, the Avalon has, in conjunction with the Embassy of the Czech Republic, been presenting the Lions of Czech Film series. The latest installment is Aurel Klimt and Vlasta Pospísilová’s Fimfárum, a series of five animated Czech folk tales the pair worked on over the course of nearly two decades. With subject matter that, on the fairy tale continuum, leans more towards Grimm than Disney, the shorts are definitely adult-oriented, and told with visually inventive (and slightly demented) stop motion animation and puppetry.

View the trailer.
Playing at the Avalon Theatre for one night only, Wednesday, December 13 at 8 p.m.