DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This appears to be, hands-down, the cutest movie that will be released all year. Two skinny British kids with an (unhealthy?) obsession with Stallone’s second most famous alter-ego decide to make a Rambo-inspired action film of their own. It’s the sort of thing that thousands of kids around the world probably did as home video equipment became easily accessible to households in the 1980s, when the movie is set. Witness the success of the most famous of all the child auteurs, the crew that remade Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot while they were teenagers and are touring with the surprisingly impressive result to this day. Garth Jennings (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) reportedly had been working on this project for years, basing much of it on his own experiences as an action-obsessed British youth with access to a camera. Plenty of us can relate. Once you combine those heady early days of home video with the Rambo craze (raise your hand if you donned a red bandana and a muscle shirt to become Sly for a Halloween 20-odd years ago), you get a nostalgia trip of mammoth proportions.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and Bethesda Row
—
In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins’ character is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, and when the real murderer starts bragging about the killing, the authorities pointedly ignore the new evidence. This sort of thing is horrific enough in a work of fiction, but what about when such an atrocity happens in reality? And what if the person in question isn’t just imprisoned, but on the human processing line Texas likes to call death row? That’s part of the focus of this documentary, made for the Independent Film Channel by Steve James, the director of the acclaimed Hoop Dreams and co-director Peter Gilbert. The story of Carlos de Luna, the innocent man that the state of Texas put to death, is told by Carroll Pickett, a minister who, in a parallel with another Tim Robbins film, Dead Man Walking, spent years as a chaplain to the condemned, spending final hours with nearly 100 men over the course of 15 years, and witnessing the first ever lethal injection. Pickett relates his experiences on death row both in general, and specifically related to the de Luna case, painting a grim picture of the practice of capital punishment. For a look at the death penalty without a position on the matter, you’ll have to look elsewhere; the filmmakers firmly take up Pickett’s cause: after his tenure, Pickett became an outspoken advocate for the abolition of the death penalty). Next week’s screening at the All Souls Unitarian Church is also designed as an advocacy event, an opportunity for audiences to discuss the film, and the movement to end the death penalty, after the screening.
View the trailer.
Screens on Tuesday at the All Souls Unitarian Church’s Pierce Hall (1500 Harvard St. NW) at 6:30 p.m. Also at the AFI Silver on Wednesday at 7 p.m.
