DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
When I was eight, I visited the Grand Canyon with my mother, and the only way I’d get up to the edge was on hands and knees. If I went today, the result would probably be the same. You never know when a stray wind is going to whip up and cast you over a chest-high railing. Given the relative intensity of my own acrophobia, I’m not entirely sure how comfortable I’ll be viewing James Marsh’s new documentary, which chronicles the story of Phillipe Petit, who in 1974 stunned the world by managing to sneak up to the top of the then-under-construction World Trade Center, string 450 pounds of steel wire across the chasm between the towers, and then spent the better part of an hour walking, dancing, and hopping around on a 3/4 inch cable a quarter of a mile above the concrete and asphalt below. Needless to say, there was no net.
Marsh concerns himself mainly with two issues in the film. Firstly, how Petit managed to get up there in the first place, which the director describes as a scenario worthy of a heist movie all on its own. And secondly, just what significance the act itself carries. Petit considers himself an artist, not a daredevil. So as one watches and thinks about the most famous high-wire act ever undertaken, there’s always that nagging question: “But is it art”? And if you’re looking for me, I’ll be the one at the back of the theater looking at the screen nervously between a crack in my fingers.
View the trailer.
Opens today at the AFI and E Street Cinema.
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A year after his death, the National Gallery is in the midst of a retrospective on the films of Italian master Michelangeo Antonioni, and on Sunday the museum screens his most celebrated, most confounding work. L’avventura was the director’s breakthrough, the film that began his reputation as a giant, even as it divided audiences with controversy. Not that its content was shocking, mind you. The central argument about L’avventura wasn’t over specific content of the film as much as it was over whether it was really any good or not, or if there was even a point to it. Antonioni took the entire concept of film narrative and tossed it out the window, setting up his movie as a mystery in which a group of vacationers search for a missing member of their party on a deserted Mediterranean island. Only the mystery, initially the reason for the movie’s existence, becomes less and less of a factor in the film’s meditative unfolding, until it’s merely an afterthought (if even a thought at all) to the quiet interactions of the characters. Everything you may have heard about the film is true: it’s slow, maddening, and steadfastly unwilling to meet the expectations of the audience. But it’s also breathtakingly beautiful, and a keeper of mysteries far more important than where a missing girl lies. Revolutions don’t always start with a bang, and L’avventura fires its shot with silent grace.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Concourse Auditorium.
