DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Tonight is opening night for Filmfest DC, which goes until May 3. The opening selection is French director Phillipe Faucon’s Two Ladies, and over the next week and a half the festival screens over 70 features, plus shorts, at venues all over town. The international film festival has a concentration on Latin American film this year, but as usual the selected films are from all over the world, and there are new films from seasoned veterans such as Andrzej Wajda and Carlos Saura, and up-and-comers like Britain’s David Mackenzie or Brazil’s José Padilha.
There’s also a thread of music related films running through this year’s selections. The story of Saura’s film sits squarely in the middle of Portugeuse Fado music culture. There are concert films of Bob Dylan (at the Newport Folk Festival) and James Brown (David Leaf’s The Night James Brown Saved Boston). There’s a locally based drama that immerses itself in D.C.’s go-go culture, Jazz in the Diamond District (starring Wood Harris, The Wire‘s Avon Barksdale), and an archival documentary covering the greats of jazz music and dance.
But there’s no film in the whole festival we’re looking forward to more than tomorrow night’s Patti Smith: Dream of Life, an impressionistic take on the punk legend filmed over the course of more than a decade by fashion photographer Steven Sebring, narrated by the singer/artist/poet herself, and featuring both live footage and a more intimate look at her life outside the spotlight. Both Smith and Sebring will be at tomorrow night’s 9:30 p.m. screening at the Lincoln Theatre, and as of this writing, tickets are still available, $10.
View the trailer for Dream of Life.
Filmfest DC runs from April 24-May 3; for a full schedule of films and ticketing, see their website.
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With the weather getting warmer, that can only mean one thing: time to start watching movies outdoors again. While we wait for this summer’s schedule of movies at Screen on the Green, there’s a more traditional venue for viewing movies under the stars, and that’s the drive-in. The D.C. area’s best drive-in isn’t technically in the D.C. area at all, but in Baltimore, the storied Bengies Drive-In, which has been operating continuously now for over half a century. Bengies boasts the biggest movie screen in the country, and still maintains an atmosphere one imagines isn’t much different than it had in the 50s, aside from the smaller, less Detroit-centric cars and the occasional bonehead flashing a laser pointer at the screen. The Bengies opened for the 2008 season last weekend, and is holding over the same triple feature from last weekend this week: the oddball Christina Ricci-James McAvoy fantasy rom-com Penelope, current box office champ The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan, and the highly entertaining Jason Statham Brit-heist film The Bank Job.
The Bengies has triple features (and sometimes more) on Friday and Saturday nights from now until well into October. It’s worth the trip (and if you go once, you’ll be hooked on the experience), just make sure you read the house rules before going, because The Bengies does not suffer fools lightly.
