DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Major Release: There Will Be Blood
We should have held our tongues on our top 10 for the year until the actual end of the year. Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film slipped in just under the 2007 wire in limited release last week, and the director channels John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, and his own wild-eyed imagination to craft what very well could be the best film of the year. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Daniel Plainview, a turn of the century prospector in the California desert who strikes oil and fashions himself over the course of three decades into an oil tycoon who preaches the gospel of win-at-all costs greed just as passionately as Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday does the gospel of the Lord. Both actors throw themselves into the roles with frightening commitment. But the film is much more than the great performances, or the stunning discordant beauty of the string soundtrack by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. Nothing Anderson has done previously quite prepares you for what he’s accomplished here, a sprawling misanthropic epic that takes on religion, greed and the darkest corners of the American dream with such ferocity that it will leave you with chills for days after leaving the theater.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Georgetown and Bethesda Row, expands to more theatres next Friday.
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Repertory: Edward II
As we mentioned in today’s theater preview, the Shakespeare Theatre Company‘s Marlow festival is drawing to a close this weekend. The National Gallery is offering a rare opportunity, in conjunction with the theater, to see both a stage production and a screening of Derek Jarman’s film version of Marlowe’s Edward II in the same week. Marlowe’s play profiles the life of the 14th century monarch, paying particular attention to his alleged affair with an individual who was not only not part of the nobility, but also (*gasp*) a man. Edward was eventually deposed and murdered, and the scandalous tale is pretty racy stuff by Elizabethan standards. Modern readings tend to play up those elements even more, and Jarman’s film may represent the pinnacle of that trend, adding in a fairly explicit love scene between the king and his lover, as well as recasting his army as gay rights protesters whose actions recall the Stonewall riots. Jarman also sets the film in an indeterminate time period that contains both modern and medieval elements. He’d done this sort of updating of classically themed material before, but perhaps never better than here.
View the trailer.
Plays tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. and Sunday at 4:30 p.m. in the National Gallery’s East Building Concourse, Large Auditorium. Free.
