DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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 all been minimalist, languorous affairs, short on plot and traditional drama, long on beautiful cinematography and slow, meditative pace. They’re not for everyone: audiences who went to Last Days anticipating a Kurt Cobain biopic or to Elephant waiting for a thrilling Columbine recreation were sorely disappointed, and audiences expecting traditional narrative may have to wait for next year’s Harvey Milk biopic. Paranoid Park fits squarely into the hypnotic mold of those previous films. Van Sant returns to the high school world of Elephant, though the death that is central to Park is accidental. And rather than the whole movie leading up to that death, it is the event that triggers the rest of the movie, as a young skateboarder who is involved in the killing struggles to deal with the tragedy amidst the usual angst of girls, parents, and school. The final product, shot by the mad genius of cinematography Christopher Doyle (responsible for the gorgeous visuals in most of Wong Kar Wai’s filmography), is sure to be divisive and difficult, yet a beautiful and haunting film to immerse oneself in.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street.
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After spending much of the winter highlighting directors, the AFI is starting the first of a couple of spring series concentrating on the works of classic actors. First up is Robert Mitchum, one of the most dangerous leading men to emerge from the film noir era. Though he made his name playing dark and mysterious characters, he managed, in his later career, to become far more versatile, often playing against the type he established in the ’50s. We’re really looking forward to the chance to see the original Cape Fear; if you think DeNiro is scary in the Scorcese remake, Mitchum will give you nightmares for weeks. And his murderous preacher in Night of the Hunter is one of the great villains in film history. Both of those films screen in April. This week features one of the great film noirs, Out of the Past, in which Mitchum stars alongside Kirk Douglas, and which contains all those great old film noir staples, from love triangles to duplicitous women to our hero’s doomed attempts to escape what fate has in store. Also on the schedule is a noir double feature of Otto Preminger’s Angel Face and the D.C.-set post-WWII thriller Crossfire.
The retrospective begins today and runs through May 5 at the AFI.
