DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis
The year after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, directors Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz began compiling archival footage of the civil rights leader for a documentary. The result was a sprawling three-hour collection of footage that seeks to tell MLK’s story through this newsreel footage, with a ton of celebrity narrators including Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Burt Lancaster, and Charleton Heston, among others. Unfortunately, after an extremely limited one-day-only benefit run in theaters, and a couple of television airings, the critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated film was released to home video slashed in half and without the narrations. Even that version is now long out of print, making it extremely difficult to see one of the first documents of a nation’s grief after King’s murder. Hopefully that oversight will soon be remedied. Until then, thanks to a collaboration between the AFI and TV One, the Silver Theater hosts two free screenings on Monday’s holiday of the full, original cut of the film.
Playing at the AFI Monday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Screenings are free, and tickets may only be obtained at the AFI box office after 9:30 Monday morning, limit four per person.
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Call me a glutton for punishment, but I just can’t resist a new Woody Allen film. It’s a thankless inclination, since for every Sweet and Lowdown or Match Point in the director’s late-career catalog, there seem to be five Anything Elses. His latest, Cassandra’s Dream, follows the (mis)fortunes of two brothers, played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, who find themselves in a spot of financial difficulty and must resort to crime to pull themselves out. It’s not unfamiliar territory for Allen, who seems to spend a lot of time contemplating the existential implications of murder. What the film definitely has going for it is that it’s deadly serious. Despite his comic reputation, his dramatic-leaning movies, with a few exceptions, nearly always play better than his straight comedies. And while his ruminations on morality in the face of an absent god and cruel fate can be awfully wordy, when he’s at the top of his game, they’re fascinating to watch.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row.
