DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
A lot of the romance associated with Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age has a lot to do with the visual look of the films. And that distinctive look, with hyper-saturated colors that seemed oh-so-glamorous in comparison with the muted tones of everyday life, was a result of the distinctive film process that made the movies look just fantastical enough to separate audiences from the day to day drudgeries of reality, and was particularly effective for this same reason, when paired with movie musicals as it so often was. The term became so ubiquitous its heyday that it’s still used today, more than 30 years after the last Technicolor film (The Godfather II) was made to describe anything colored brightly or at the edge of reality.
The National Gallery is spending this weekend celebrating the color process with screenings of three classics in recently restored prints that should really showcase the brilliance of those old films. Saturday starts with a heavily melodramatic romance in the afternoon, I’ve Always Loved You. In the evening is the similarly melodramatic, but somewhat darker Leave Her To Heaven, about that favorite Hollywood subject, the dangerously obsessive woman. Finally, on Sunday, the most well known of the trio, Joseph Mankiewicz’s classic The Barefoot Contessa, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Gardner plays a flamenco dancer, reportedly partly based on Rita Hayworth, who goes from rags to riches thanks to a has-been director (Bogart) who makes three films with her, and becomes her adviser as she navigates through the tragic tale of her life.
At the National Gallery of Art this weekend in the East Building Concourse. I’ve Always Loved You and Leave Her to Heaven Saturday at 2 and 4:30 p.m. respectively, and The Barefoot Contessa Sunday at 4:30 p.m.
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This documentary, by locally raised filmmaker Ilana Trachtman, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Washington Jewish Film Festival at the end of last year, and now comes to the area for a theatrical run at the Avalon. Trachtman manages the difficult task of making a documentary about an inspiring young man with Down Syndrome without crossing over into maudlin or overly treacly territory. Lior, the subject of the film, is shown in archival footage with his mother (who died of cancer when Lior was still young), and then picks up again in the months leading up to his Bar Mitvah, an event always looked forward to in the life of any young Jewish boy, but which took particular significance for Lior because of his unusually fervent and visible connection with God. His coming of age becomes an event not just for him, but for an entire community brought together by him, while his family meanwhile goes about the business of simply being a family, along with the challenges presented by Lior’s condition. Trachtman presents all of this sensitively and non-exploitatively, in a genuinely touching documentary.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Avalon. Lior Liebling and his family will meet the audience following the 3:30 show on Saturday and will introduce that evening’s 8:15 screening.
